How to Prevent the Bank Robbery No One Can See

“This is a stickup! Give me all your bitcoins!”

Those words may not seem as terrifying as the shouts and gunshots of infamous bank robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sounded to bankers in the early 1900s. But they would quickly create a crippling panic if you saw them flash across your screen seconds after your computer locked up.

If Butch and Sundance were alive today, instead of riding up on horseback, they would sneak into banks invisibly, riding in on malware to deliver their demand digitally to each customer’s account.

Cybercrime is big business. The 2016 Cybercrime Report from Cybersecurity Ventures predicts cyber crime will cost the world in excess of $6 trillion annually by 2021, making it more profitable than the global trade of all major illegal drugs combined. Just like bank robbers in the Old West, today’s cyber criminals are ruthless. Threats and techniques have grown increasingly sophisticated and more sinister.

In the Cisco 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report, experts explain that the intent has changed from clearing out the vault to clearing out data.

Cyber thieves can now lock systems and destroy data, perhaps even be planning a wide-reaching, high-impact attack to disrupt the entire internet. Additionally, with the pace and scale of technological change, the attack surface is getting larger. There are more security gaps and vulnerabilities across devices and networks for cyber criminals to exploit.

Cybersecurity Challenges for Financial Services Organizations

There are additional challenges for financial services firms that make it even harder to detect these invisible cyber threats. A complicated mix of security vendors and products makes threats more unclear and difficult to understand instead of providing additional insight.

46% of the financial services organizations surveyed for the Cisco 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report said they see thousands of daily alerts but investigate only 55% of them. Of the ones they investigate, 28% are considered legitimate—yet only 43% of that 28 % of legitimate threats are addressed.

With so many security products and vendors that aren’t integrated, information security incident response teams face challenges. Given the high number of alerts, it can be difficult to assign priority and to find duplicates. Without integration, security teams are limited in their ability to correlate and analyze threats.

Integrating legacy applications with emerging technologies can be a daunting task for security teams. Multiple products often operate in silos. Individually, they may be effective, but without integration to share and correlate security information, security teams will be left to manage conflicting alerts and reports.

Brush up on your defense

To learn more about the newest types of cyber threats and how to prepare your IT organization to overcome them, download the new Cisco 2017 Midyear Cybersecurity Report.

To learn more about Cisco Financial Services please visit: www.cisco.com/go/financialservices