Financial services organizations are more targeted than ever

In today’s financial services climate, innovation, stellar service, and digital transformation have become table stakes. Past results are no guarantee of future success. Savvy, digital-native consumers expect seamless, well-designed, secure applications and services to be available at any hour. As a result, banks, brokerage houses, and fintech firms need to strategically adapt to this rapidly changing marketplace and provide 24/7 uptime — all while offering airtight data privacy and security.

Highly regulated, targeted, and breached

The financial services industry is one of the most highly regulated business sectors on the planet. For an industry with trillions of dollars at stake, and its combination of assets under management and petabytes – if not exabytes – of prized personal and financial data, the sector has remained one of the most targeted and attacked by nation-state hacking groups and other well-funded international bad actors armed with increasingly powerful AI technology.

In fact, a recent Kroll report found that financial services was the most breached industry in 2023. You don’t need to be a cyber security expert to know that this is fundamentally, well, not good. From ransomware to local file attacks, phishing, credential theft, and DDoS attacks, financial services are getting a lot of attention lately, much of it decidedly unwanted (in fact, the sector overtook gaming as the recipient of the most DDoS attacks last year).

From the Equifax breach in 2017 (147 million customers affected) to 2019’s Capital One breach (100 million+ credit card applications) and First American Financial Services' breach (885 million records), there is clearly plenty of continuing interest in accessing the valuable data housed in the sector. In 2024 alone, notable bank breaches have included HSBC-Barclays, Argentina Central, M&T, and Santander.

Here’s the good news

Fortunately, there have been positive developments on the cyber security side of the equation. From widespread adoption of Zero Trust methodologies to advances in AI for combating breaches, there is some good news on the horizon. For instance, AI itself is like a gray hat hacker — able to inflict serious damage on the attack side but also able to use the same talent, speed, technologies, and skill sets to protect industries like financial services from AI-enabled attacks.

Beyond AI, financial services organizations should invest in cyber security defenses with intelligence built in, along with the ability to analyze massive amounts of diverse traffic to constantly add to that intelligence. This enables financial services organizations to stay abreast of the latest attacks without devoting more manual resources to defense. The security sector has not been idle while attackers ramp up their efforts. Today, security platforms are available that:

• Automatically incorporate the latest threat intelligence, as described above.
• Use machine learning and AI to identify attacks, from phishing campaigns to malicious bots, before they happen.
• Distribute their capabilities across a global network in order to stop attacks no matter where they come from, and without causing app performance delays.
• Combine security with networking services to ensure secure connectivity for employees, contractors, users, and customers alike.

The right cyber security strategies will help traditional banks, fintech startups, established brokers and vendors, financial app developers, and everyone in between stay both nimble and secure.

Securing for the future

As attackers have evolved new techniques and technologies to illegally access money and data, Cloudflare's connectivity cloud securely connects and protects distributed workers, apps, and networks around the globe. Cloudflare’s vendor-agnostic platform lets businesses in and out of the financial sector maintain control over data, improve visibility and security, reduce complexity, and house all of their proprietary, customer, and vendor data in one simple, secure location. The Cloudflare connectivity cloud can help financial services organizations to:

1. Protect custom applications: Protect business-critical applications that need consistent uptime and fast performance.
2. Provide a superior online experience: Financial institutions customers expect performance, convenience, and availability from their online platforms, even during peak activity.
3. Secure remote workforce: Provide secure access to internal applications for any user, regardless of device or location, with seamless authentication.
4. Strengthen security posture: Provide a single pane of glass for managing multiple security and networking services.
5. Improve agility and lower operational costs: Replacing legacy infrastructure with cloud-based services accelerates time to market and frees budget to be used for innovation.
6. Deploy intelligence at the edge: Enforce geo-based access policies or lower latency by deploying serverless code on a global edge network.

With global reach and advanced, AI-based security capabilities, all on one platform, Cloudflare offers financial organizations a secure, resilient global cloud network that can help them accelerate their digital transformation efforts and improve operational excellence.

This article is part of a series on the latest trends and topics impacting today’s technology decision-makers.

Dive deeper into this topic.

Learn more about the top security challenges facing financial services organizations and best practices for managing cyber risk in the Cyber security best practices for financial services whitepaper.