Much of a bank or financial institution’s operations take place with the use of technology, including through the Internet. Without solid cyber security measures in place, your bank’s sensitive data could be at risk. Here are the five biggest threats to a bank’s cyber security.
1. Unencrypted Data
This is a very basic yet crucial part of good cyber security. All data stored on computers within your financial institution and online should be encrypted. Even if your data is stolen by hackers, it cannot be immediately used by them if it’s encrypted – if left unencrypted, hackers can use the data right away, creating serious problems for your financial institution.
2. Malware
End user devices – such as computers and cell phones – that have been compromised by malware pose a risk to your bank’s cyber security each time they connect with your network. Sensitive data passes through this connection and if the end user device has malware installed on it, without proper security, that malware could attack your bank’s networks.
3. Third Party Services that Aren’t Secure
Many banks and financial institutions employ third party services from other vendors in an effort to better serve their customers. However, if those third-party vendors don’t have good cyber security measures in place, your bank could be the one that suffers. It’s important to look into how you can protect from security threats imposed by third parties before you deploy their solutions.
4. Data That Has Been Manipulated
Sometimes hackers don’t go in to steal data – they simply go in to change it. Unfortunately, this type of attack can be difficult to detect right away and can cause financial institutions to incur millions of dollars in damages, if not more. Because the altered data doesn’t necessarily look any different than unaltered data on the surface, it can be challenging to identify what has and hasn’t been altered if your bank has been attacked in this manner.
5. Spoofing
A newer type of cyber security threat is spoofing – where hackers will find a way to impersonate a banking website’s URL with a website that looks and functions exactly the same. When a user enters his or her login information, that information is then stolen by hackers to be used later. Even more concerning is that new spoofing techniques do not use a slightly different but similar URL – they are able to target users who visited the correct URL.
As a bank or financial institution, it is absolutely imperative that you find ways to mitigate the threats to your cyber security while still being able to provide your customers with convenient, technologically advanced options. At SQN, we’ve partnered with cyber security industry leader Q6Cyber to help provide increased security against potential data breaches.
To learn more about how to increase your bank’s cyber security, fill out our online form.
