By Joe Bernik, McAfee CTO for Financial Services
The financial services sector continues to be the target of cyber attacks, as highlighted in the Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations report. However, the trend of cyber attacks has also migrated to other verticals, such as the healthcare industry with the WannaCry attack and other hospital data breaches. It is expected that the banks' significant investments have worked and that the reduction in general incidents is a demonstration of their better security posture. Of the reported attacks, most were associated with DDOS or were mainly extraction efforts for card data theft.
Account theft remains an issue for the banking industry, although improvements in fraud detection and authentication have reduced the success of these types of attacks. Meanwhile, insider trading continues to increase and banks clearly need to invest more in their systems and behavioral analysis to protect themselves.
Security improvements may have reduced the number of breaches in financial services. On the other hand, we must also examine an alternative theory: that the high availability of financial data has reduced its value and, therefore, has led criminals to seek more profitable paths - for example, health data, social insurance numbers or other personal data. UK health care analysts estimate that medical information can be worth ten times more than credit card numbers on the Dark Web.
Cybercriminals will always seek to monetize attacks. Criminal activity will still affect financial institutions, which will continue to bear the brunt of monetary losses associated with cybercrime regardless of the industry originally targeted.
In addition, we can expect an increase in mobile and cloud-based attacks as these technologies are winning over the consumer. To circumvent these threats, communication between the financial sector and the vertical lines of the industry will be one of the best defenses, as the cybercrime business continues to keep pace with technical developments.
Account theft remains an issue for the banking industry, although improvements in fraud detection and authentication have reduced the success of these types of attacks. Meanwhile, insider trading continues to increase and banks clearly need to invest more in their systems and behavioral analysis to protect themselves.
Security improvements may have reduced the number of breaches in financial services. On the other hand, we must also examine an alternative theory: that the high availability of financial data has reduced its value and, therefore, has led criminals to seek more profitable paths - for example, health data, social insurance numbers or other personal data. UK health care analysts estimate that medical information can be worth ten times more than credit card numbers on the Dark Web.
Cybercriminals will always seek to monetize attacks. Criminal activity will still affect financial institutions, which will continue to bear the brunt of monetary losses associated with cybercrime regardless of the industry originally targeted.
In addition, we can expect an increase in mobile and cloud-based attacks as these technologies are winning over the consumer. To circumvent these threats, communication between the financial sector and the vertical lines of the industry will be one of the best defenses, as the cybercrime business continues to keep pace with technical developments.
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