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BackFuture of Fintech
How can a financial institution protect itself from cyber attacks?
November 20, 2022
As our world advances, so does technology and the demand for easier access to the services we use and depend upon throughout our daily lives. Services that are provided by you as a financial institution, your clients put their trust in to ensure their personal and financial data is protected. Along with the ever-changing technical landscape comes the inevitable race institutions are faced with to remain up to date. As systems increase in size and complexity, so does the strain on resources and the ability to effectively safeguard your systems and the sensitive assets they retain.
Cyber attacks on banks and financial service providers in recent years have become more prominent. Cybercriminals have evolved with the times and use ever more sophisticated tactics to target your system. These cybercriminals learn and evolve with the times, and the only way to protect against the threat they pose is to evolve your institution 's security measures to withstand and combat their attacks.
What steps can a financial institution take to protect itself from cyber attacks?
Without well-planned and implemented cybersecurity measures, your business and sensitive data are at risk of compromise in the event of a successful cyber-attack.
1.Assess Your Bank’s Infrastructure and Its Cybersecurity
The infrastructure which hosts your applications and enterprise systems holds your business data within its databases and serves as the foundation which ensures your business and services are running smoothly on a day-to-day basis.
2.Establish A Security Policy
A Security policy defines for a financial institution and its enterprise systems what secure should look like it handles the standards for what is considered secure behaviour. Security policies can be very in-depth and cover multiple areas of the business estate and its security landscape, in this case, cybersecurity. The security policy should also incorporate regulatory and enterprise compliance requirements, including when to apply patches to maintain compliance.
3.Implement Logging and Monitoring
Logging and monitoring are essential to ensuring a business can react quickly and effectively to security incidents. It provides an auditable trail that can be used by your security team to assess the situation and isolate the cause.
4.Create a Disaster Recovery Plan
In the event of a disaster be it caused by environmental factors, a security breach or anything which may prevent your business from performing its day-to-day business needs, consider what procedures or redundancy you have in place as a financial institution to prevent downtime and continue conducting business.
5.Encrypt Your Data
Data is one of the most important assets for any institution and in turn a high-value target for threat actors. Ensuring strong encryption of your data and protecting the decryption keys is an essential part of data security and ensures this valuable and sensitive asset is secure from compromise.
6.Implement Multi-Factor Authentication
A user account in this case linked to a bank account from the outside looking in is only as strong as the account security which can be incorporated into it. The login functionality of your banking website or banking mobile app is publicly available, which means it is one of the most reachable and attractive targets for an attacker. So, it would make sense to implement as much cybersecurity for the bank as possible in this high-risk area.
Security and online banking threats and countermeasures are never simple subjects and are the root of many concerns when it comes to sensitive data and assets. A security breach can come at a hefty cost to a financial institution resulting in regulatory fines, reputation damage and in turn loss of business.
Now you should have some insight into the challenges which banks and other financial institutions are facing in securing themselves against cyber threats and have an understanding of ways in which you can improve your institution's security measures, to meet the growing demands of this technology-driven world.
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If you have any questions or feedback, or just want to say hi, send us a note at marketing@ipeakoin.com. We always love to chat.
As a neobank, iPeakoin builds a new generation of banking for all businesses to operate without borders and restrictions. We aim to create social value, serve the public good and drive sustainable growth for our customers.
