The financial services industry (FSI) is a complex ecosystem in which each entity has dependencies on others around it. In this highly interconnected sector, an attack on one part of the ecosystem can result in collateral damage and detrimental implications for other organizations across the sector.
With that risk profile in mind, forward-leaning financial services firms are working on response plans to cyberattacks by preparing for both incidents that could target their individual company and attacks that could impact third-party entities with whom they are integrated on varying levels.
But are financial services ready to respond to a systemic attack that could impact their overarching infrastructure across borders?
In the Crosshairs: The Weaker Links in the Chain
The FSI continues to face new and challenging attacks every day. In a longstanding arms race against financial cybercrime, this sector is considered one of the most security-forward industries. Many threat actors thus look for the weakest point in the tightly knit financial services network and then work to extend their attack across the more protected links in the system.
For example, cybercriminals often target community banks and credit unions, likely assuming these smaller entities have humbler security budgets. While smaller financial institutions are responsible for managing almost 50 percent of the core deposits held by banks in the U.S., they often have limited cybersecurity budgets and substantially smaller security staff in house. Adversarial activities of all types — whether facilitated by banking Trojans or directly affecting the bank’s internal networks — could start at smaller organizations and spread out to larger ones as a next step.
Systemic Cyberattacks Are on the Horizon
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