Results of financial institutions security risks research bared

FINANCIAL institutions are under pressure to ramp up security, with trends such as the increased take-up of mobile banking putting banks’ IT infrastructure defenses at growing risk of cyberattack.

Increasingly, customers are playing an important role in highlighting security incidents, with a quarter (24%) of financial institutions saying that some of the threats they faced in 2016 were identified and reported to them by a customer.

According to the Financial Institutions Security Risks research from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, security investment is a high priority for banks and financial institutions. Suffering from attacks both on their own infrastructure and on their customers, retail banks spend three times as much on IT security as comparably sized nonfinancial institutions.

Moreover, 64% of banks admit that they will invest in improving their IT security regardless of the return-on-investment, in order to meet the growing demands of government regulators, top management and even their customers.

Despite banks putting serious efforts and budgets into safeguarding their perimeters against known and unknown cyberthreats, protecting the breadth of IT infrastructure that now exists — from traditional to specialized, ATMs and Point-of-Sale terminals — has proved difficult.

The vast and ever-changing threat landscape, coupled with the challenge of improving the security habits of customers, has provided fraudsters with ever more points of vulnerability to exploit.

Emerging risks related to mobile banking are highlighted in the report as a trend that can expose banks to new cyberthreats. A total of 42% of banks predict that an overwhelming majority of their customers will use mobile banking within three years, but admit that users are too careless in their online behavior. The majority of the banks surveyed admitted (46%) that their customers are frequently under attack from phishing attempts, with 70% of banks also reporting financial fraud incidents as a result, leading to monetary loss.

Rising phishing and social engineering attacks on customers have seen banks reassess their security efforts in this area. A total of 61% of respondents see improving the security of apps and Web sites that their customers use as one of their main security priorities, closely followed by the implementation of more complex authentication and verification of log-in details (a key priority for 52%).