The internet has changed the way financial transactions occur. Today, with just a tap on your mobile device, you can transfer and receive money, which wasn’t possible a few years ago. Now, as long as you are connected to the internet, you don’t have to visit your bank frequently.
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Besides, cybersecurity has become a rising threat. And the financial sector, like many other sectors, is facing some major cybersecurity threats. According to some stats, about 80% of financial institutions report an increase in cyberattacks within the past two years. Following are the biggest cybersecurity threats to financial services in 2022 and onwards.
1. Phishing
Phishing is the act of sending an email purporting to be from a reputable company in an attempt to gain access to sensitive information of the victim, such as account credentials. According to Akamai’s 2019 State of the Internet report, more than half of the reported phishing attacks were linked to financial services.
Email phishing is the most common form of this cyberattack; email is sent to the victims posing to be coming from a legitimate source, such as a bank. Clicking on an infected link or downloading an attachment in the phishing email might initiate the installation of malware on the victim’s device and hack the system or revert to a fake web page asking for login credentials to get access to the victim’s bank account.
These emails are so professionally tailored that they may seem convincing enough to the unsuspecting recipient. Another scary form of this type of attack is when these phishing emails are sent as a reply message to an already existing email thread. This tactic is known as email conversation thread hijacking and calls for attention to every single email you receive. In any case, do not expose your credentials, as no financial institute would ask you about it.
2. Ransomware
Ransomware is a type of cyberattack where the criminal limits the victim’s access to his important data and asks for ransom in exchange for getting back the access to it. Financial institutes are some of the most attractive victims of cyber criminals as they possess sensitive user information and have the potential to pay a large amount of ransom.
The criminals usually publish a portion of sensitive data over their criminal forums or website and blackmail the victim organization to pay the ransom in return for removing that information. Unfortunately, such tactics work and are very effective against financial institutions due to their heavy regulations against data breaches and cyberattacks. And with ransomware entering into the territory of a data breach, a successful attack might have much larger implications over the regulatory compliance standards.
3. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
DDoS attacks are on the rise, with an 80% increase last year. In a denial-of-service attack, the perpetrators seek to make a system unavailable for its intended users by either indefinitely disrupting the services of a connected host or temporarily shutting the system down.
Threat actors cause this attack to happen using already compromised systems such as computers and other networked devices. They may also employ off-the-shelf toolkits such as DDoS-for-service websites to carry out the attack.
DDoS attacks can disrupt the whole business operation resulting in significant financial loss and posing a major threat to financial institutes. Since the attack surface of the financial services sector is much larger, comprising customer accounts, transaction portals, and banking IT infrastructure, it is more in danger of this sort of attack than others.
4. Web Application Attacks
While web applications offer a number of advantages, there are still many security concerns that stem from the improper coding of these applications. Critical vulnerabilities allow direct access of databases to the criminals for them to churn away all the sensitive information. It is known as a web application attack, and many databases attacked by these attacks contain important data such as the personal and financial details of customers. Thus, financial institutions need to be aware of this attack.
To Sum Up,
Financial Institutions are an integral part of the economy, and all of us rely on the financial services they offer. However, as the financial sector is becoming more and more digitalized, the cybersecurity threats associated with it are also on the rise. The above-mentioned are some of the most common cybersecurity threats to financial services right now. We have to be careful about these security concerns to keep our important data and money safe from criminal hands.
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