Financial Services to Take Cyber Security in Their Own Hands

According to the statistics, the financial sector has been the most attacked industry for the past three years, with 19% of the total attacks of 2018. This percentage is taken from the “IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index” report, and this trend is expected to continue for at least a few more years. In this environment, customers need a solid reason before they invest their trust in your company. Therefore, being transparent and demonstrating a mature, integrated business and security model is imperative for building trust.

A breach can have significant consequences, from impacting the organization’s image to regulatory repercussions, further resulting in the loss of trust. While this is bad for the industry, it also provides the opportunity of gaining a competitive advantage over the other players. Addressing the security challenges while also being innovative will position your company in the minds of customers as a distinguished and strong organization. Here are some steps to get started with:

Strengthen your defense strategy: Optimized capabilities such as advanced data intelligence gathering and security analytics with AI and automation can be used to force-multiply your teams’ efforts and assess advanced threats that may have bypassed your controls. To ensure correct implementation, hire the services of a well-reputed cyber security testing company.

Collaborate with industry peers and experts: You’re more vulnerable when you’re alone. Taking cyber threats head-on by yourself is brave but sometimes ineffective. Keep in mind that a threat to your organization is a threat to the whole industry. So, bring together other players in the market and collectively tackle the problem. Communicate with communities, cyber range facilities, professional services, and integrate intelligence analysis tools to neutralize threats and improve your readiness.

Practice incident response: Contingency plans are imperative to keep you prepared for the worst. Develop dynamic response playbooks that use AI and ML to process threat intelligence information automatically and practice your incident response plans thoroughly.

Increase attention on fundamentals: Your core responsibilities should include understanding your firm’s vulnerabilities and attack surfaces, knowing your assets and inventories, using multilevel authentication and layered defenses, classifying sensitive data and tracking usage patterns, improving patch management, ensuring device security and more.

Build digital trust: Customers don’t want the security at the expense of convenience and vice versa. Therefore, adopting new approaches to identity and access management (IAM) to enable authentication without affecting customer experience is crucial. Technologies such as passive behavioral biometric approaches that enables you to focus on your identity rather than what you know.

Innovate while improving defenses and manage risk with enterprise cloud security: Pursue accelerated growth and the benefits of the hybrid cloud while securing data and workloads in the cloud.

Foster a security-oriented culture and expand executive involvement: Work to make security a central focus for all employees and elevate security beyond the responsibility of the chief information security officer (CISO) alone.

Author Bio:

Ray Parker is an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast who loves to incorporate new technologies to get more efficient outcomes. When he’s not marketing his latest venture, he keeps himself busy in writing technical articles to educate peers and professionals.