19/08/2021
Email: the Number One Attack Vector and the Financial Services Firms
$5.9 million is the average cost of a data breach for U.S. financial institutions — 52% higher than other industries.
Money, investments, and loads of sensitive personal information are the potential gain for threat actors. Globally, financial services companies have recently seen a major rise in digital transactions, mobile banking, and overall email volume, driving them to add more scalable cloud-based systems to their core legacy systems, especially for email. As a result, the potential for cybersecurity breaches has risen. Every new email might be a phishing or malware mule, or a tunnel for ransomware.
Financial services — companies, investment firms, and fin-tech -presents a rich pocket for cybercriminals to pick. Cyberattacks can take a company offline, cause customer panic or shut operations temporarily, all of which lead to financial loss.
The financial services industry, which includes banks, insurance companies, investment firms, and fin-tech is a perennial target of email attacks. This is due to the nature of dealing with money, the large customer base, and the valuable personal data of each customer, such as national identification numbers, banking details, contact, and income data. The stakes are higher and the potential value of a heist is bigger in financial services. In fact, the cost of data breaches in the financial services industry, including the costs of remediation, recovery and lost business has ranked among the top three industries for each of the past few years.
Businesses communicate with their customers, suppliers, and employees in many ways, but email is the major way among them. This is even more true in 2021 when workforces are scattered in continuously evolving work-from-home and hybrid in-person situations. Further, email volume has increased last year in 81% of global finance organizations.
With the increases in email volume and reliance comes an increase in email-based threats from cybercriminals. Cyberattacks are rising across all industries and financial services is not immune. In fact, most of the finance respondents expect the volume of attacks to be among their biggest email security challenges of 2021.
Email is the prevalent way that ransomware enters a network, creeping its way around and holding data hostage. And since a network is only as secure as its weakest human link — and financial services companies in our study tend to have more employees — the likelihood of a naïve click on the wrong email link can be high. And malicious links aim to dupe users into entering confidential information through a deceptively real-looking login portal, or to download malware onto their device.
But cyberattacks can cause irreparable damages such as,
*Business disruption
*Data loss
*Lost money
*Reputation damage
*Impacts on regulatory compliance
*Impact on employee productivity
to financial institutions, which rely on customer trust.
In cybersecurity, as with most things in life, being prepared can make all the difference.
*Build Multilayered defence
*Reassess technology put in place
*Pay ransomware special attention.
*Enhance security awareness training.
*Accelerate cyber resilience strategy development
will be the way forward to a more secure future for financial services firms since the digital/mobile financial services activity is expected to continue its rapid rise, so is the rate and sophistication of cyberattacks on financial firms and their customers.
