Cybersecurity Trends in Banking Industry

Banking industry is one of the most susceptible sectors to cyber-attacks. The prime reasons for being one of the prime targets for cyber criminals includes massive amount of money and enormous of data at stake, compromising which can lead to a major disruption across the entire economy. Cyber-attacks such as malware, phishing, ransomware, DDoS, and Botnet attacks amongst others are the most prominent attacks observed in the banking sector. Financial institutions therefore need to adopt robust cybersecurity frameworks in order to detect and mitigate the cyber threats in real-time for its customers to experience a secure trading.

With the ongoing technological advancements using artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud and big data, cyber-attacks are also becoming more sophisticated and are turning into a prime concern for the financial institutions. Organizations are now introducing cybersecurity at every phase of the banking process. For example, multi-factor authentication, one time password, firewalls, threat intelligence, vulnerability management and data analytics are some of the measures which are in place to constantly monitor the transactions and to eliminate the potential threats of the cyber-attacks. There are several trends which create the dire need of strong cybersecurity solution.

Cybersecurity Trends in Banking

Digitalization- the start of the new era

With the ongoing corona virus pandemic, banking sector is witnessing a paradigm shift through digitization, resulting to which the entire banking processes are now being virtualized. Financial institutions are introducing new banking options such as contactless banking, easy payment options and remote access to escalate the digital transformation across the entire banking chain. However, there is trade off when it comes to securing these processes. Cyber criminals have made several attempts such as social engineering and phishing, therefore banking institutions need to employ new cybersecurity norms to keep up with the pace of rapid digitization.

Adoption of blockchain technology to lower the risks of data breach

The decentralized nature and cryptographic hashes are making blockchain technology the most promising channel for a secure data transfer. Further, blockchain offers higher levels of transparency across the system and the records of the transactions made are immutable. Thus, blockchain technology bears the potential of secure cyber framework which could secure the digital transactions and enhance the customer privacy.

Shift to the virtual culture

The pandemic has accelerated the world of the online spendings. These higher rates of online transactions are one of the prime reasons, that the customer’s banking cards details are being compromised. Cyber-attacks such as identify theft and fraud, credentials leak and phishing frauds are the results of these compromised online transactions, generating the need of strong cyber frameworks.

Top Cybersecurity Companies offering solutions for Banking Sector

In order to manage the cyber-attacks, cybersecurity entities are enforcing several approaches and strategies to timely detect the cyber-attacks and implement the mandatory steps required to mitigate those. Below is a list of few of the top cybersecurity companies offering solutions for banking industry.

IBM

Founded in 1911, IBM is headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. The company offers banking cybersecurity solutions such as data security and protection solutions, IBM Security QRadar SIEM, Cloud identity and access management (IAM) solutions, and IBM Cloud Pak for Security.

The company has partnered with Tech Mahindra in order to expand its cybersecurity offerings for local enterprises which will include managing security compliance and bolstering business information systems.

Palo Alto Networks                                                                        

Founded in 2005, Palo Alto Networks Inc. is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, US. It is one of the leading cybersecurity companies globally. Palo Alto’s portfolio of solutions includes Network Security, Secure Access Secure Edge (SASE), Cloud-Native Security, Security Operations, Work from Home and Threat and Consulting solutions. These solutions ensure data privacy law compliance, reduce latency to internet and cloud-based applications, manage vendor and supply chain risk with Zero Trust security.

In April 2022, the company recently introduced SASE to protect home networks through its Okyo™ Garde Enterprise Edition. This edition is designed to protect businesses from home network vulnerabilities.

Fortinet

Fortinet is cybersecurity solution provider founded in 2000 is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company offers its services for electronic trading platforms and for the infrastructure. The cybersecurity solutions offered by Fortinet for financial services include FortiGate high-end firewalls, FortiGate internal segmentation firewalls, FortiManager, Fortinet Security Fabric and FortiAnalyzer.

In April 2022, the company announced new features of FortisOS 7.2 which unifies the convergence of networking and security across NGFW, SD-WAN, LAN Edge, 5G, ZTNA.

Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in 1975 and is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, United States. The company is one of the prominent leaders in the cybersecurity space. Microsoft Security’s product portfolio includes Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Power BI. Additionally, the company also offers High-performance computing (HPC), Backup and archive and Cloud-scale analytics solutions. Microsoft Azure, a cloud-based solution, is designed to optimize the risk management and simplify the regulatory compliance. It further aids the banking system by facilitating the cloud resources to extend the on-premises capacity on demand. The banking clientele of Microsoft’s banking security solutions include D Bank, Temenos, Nedbank, Redwood Bank amongst others.

Recently, in February 2022, Microsoft offered its services to Axis Bank in order to secure its digital transformation by using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 for its email security which is prone to mail-based phishing and spamming attacks.

Allot 

Allot, a network and security solutions provider, was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Hod Hasharon, Israel. The company offers Allot Traffic Intelligence and Assurance platform for critical network visibility across financial organizations. The platform is powered by its Secure Service Gateway and Service Gateway products. The solution offers traffic classification, protection against DDoS attack, and digital experience monitoring and other such services to strengthen the financial institutions in real-time. Some of its customers are Banco International, Danamon, Leumi, and OCBC Bank.

Qualys

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Foster City, California, United States is an IT security company which offers vulnerability management solutions. The company’s product portfolio includes Asset Management, IT Security, Compliance Services, Cloud/Container Security and Web App Security. Amongst these solutions vulnerability management solution is most utilized by the banking institutions in order to manage cyber threats.

In April 2022, Qualys announced Multi-Vector EDR 2.0 with additional capabilities of threat-hunting and risk mitigation to improve alert prioritization and reduce the threat response time.

Kaspersky

Kaspersky is another prominent entity in the cybersecurity solutions space. The company was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Moscow, Russia. The company’s products include Targeted attack detection, Endpoint, ATM and POS systems security, Hybrid Cloud Security and Threat intelligence for isolated networks. These solutions are designed to oversee the targeted attacks, data center attacks, ransomware attacks and tracks for any malicious insider activity.

Kaspersky launched Endpoint Security Cloud Pro with added capabilities of automated response options and additional set of security controls in April 2022.

Cisco

Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, Cisco is a technology conglomerate which offers cloud-based cybersecurity solutions. It provides solutions such as Secure Firewall, Umbrella (secure gateway), Secure Endpoint, Duo (Multifactor authentication), AnyConnect, Identity Service Engine, Secure Workload, Secure Email, Analytics, Kenna Security and DDoS Protection.

Cisco entered a strategic partnership with Comcast. Comcast is intending to explore new security frameworks such as SASE and zero trust, which integrates SD-WAN with advanced security solutions, in order to secure business infrastructure.

Webroot

Webroot is a cybersecurity software solution provider which was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, United States. The company’s product portfolio includes Endpoint Protection, DNS Protection, Mobile Security SDK and Secure Anywhere Antivirus. The mobile security SDK is designed to prevent mobile fraud by embedding security features into banking applications. Such active monitoring protects from cyber threats in real-time.

Additionally, the company also offers threat intelligence services which includes Real-Time Anti-Phishing, Streaming Malware Detection and Cloud Service Intelligence.

Bitdefender

Bitdefender founded in 2001 is headquartered in Bucharest, Romania. The company offers cybersecurity solutions to various sectors including telecom, energy and utilities, banking, and technology sector. The company’s financial cybersecurity services portfolio consists of Cloud and Server Security, Endpoint Detection and Response. These solutions are based on ML and automatically detect and prevent advanced cyber threats.

In April 2022, Bitdefender announced its enhanced Premium VPN Services. The enhanced features included encryption for all web traffic, built-in ad blocker, anti-tracker, and addition of whitelist trusted websites.

Conclusion

In the near future, it can be expected that with the growing number of applications in the banking sector, several new complexities will be introduced, leading to higher cyber risks. Moreover, it will become more important for the banking companies to maintain the customer’s data privacy. Banking organizations should utilize the potentials of blockchain technology to address the exponentially increasing cyber issues. With the strong algorithms and decentralized nature of the blockchain technology, it becomes difficult for the cyber attackers to hack these, however, adoption of blockchain by the regularized banks is far from near now.

The cyber-attacks are lucrative for the cyber criminals, therefore banking organizations should continuously perform the vulnerability management tests for its infrastructure and should invest heavily in developing a robust cyber framework.

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