By Dan Bridges, Technical Director, International at Cyware
In the past year, the financial services industry has had to combat a surging number of ransomware attacks with 59% of organisations within the sector saying they experienced an incident in some form or another.
A top target for politically and financially motivated cybercriminals, financial services firms hold large quantities of sensitive customer data that criminal groups and hacktivists are keen to leverage for extortion or sale. This puts financial services organisations firmly in the sights of an ever-growing list of bad actors whose attack activities are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
This evolving threat landscape means that financial institutions need to gain enhanced visibility of all their assets, regardless of location and infrastructure. This way, they can spot the indicators of anomalous system behaviours that are crucial for identifying potential security incidents and accelerating the response times to threats.
To achieve all this, financial services firms will need to enhance their cyber security defences strategies and enable real time threat intelligence ingestion so they can stay one step ahead of emerging threats and address cybersecurity risks before they cause harm.

Knowledge is power
Under pressure to prepare for any eventuality, today’s security teams need to evaluate a wide array of data sources in order to identify potential incidents and pre-empt attacks. Everything from user behaviour analytics through to system logs and network traffic.
Sifting through a bewildering volume of data and security alerts to pinpoint which constitute a genuine concern is just part of the challenge. As cyber threats evolve, security teams also need to stay abreast of the latest techniques, tactics and procedures (TTPs) employed by cyber adversaries.
Unsurprisingly, this means that threat intelligence has become mission critical for assuring resilience in the face of new threats. Used effectively, these insights support security teams in understanding the latest approaches cybercriminals are adopting. Armed with this knowledge they can take steps to mitigate emerging threats and vulnerabilities before a full scale attack can occur.
Regrettably, according to recent research, only a third (35%) of security professionals say their organisation has a comprehensive understanding of the current threat landscape. More worryingly still, 79% admit to making security decisions with zero insight of the threats they face.
Unfortunately, this knowledge gap increases the likelihood of a serious security incident occurring. Without timely and actional intelligence, organisations not only compromise the speed and effectiveness of their risk response and mitigation capabilities. They will have to deal with higher incident response costs.
Close the knowledge gap with TIP
Today’s modern threat intelligence platforms (TIPs) enable financial services organisations to raise their game and operationalise high-confidence threat intelligence at speed. These innovative solutions accelerate how security teams gather, organise and correlate threat data from multiple internal and external sources and transform this into actionable insights that support faster, better decisions.
Streamlining how security teams manage threat data, these platforms handle everything from the ingestion, aggregation, de-duping, enrichment and analysis of threat intelligence data. Information on indicators of compromise (IOCs) can then be fed into other security tools such as security information and event management (SIEM), endpoint detection response (EDR) and cloud security posture management (CSPM) systems.
Alongside automating how organisations ingest and correlate threat data with security events, TIPs enable security teams to broaden the granularity of the insights that are assessed to detect threats. For example, TIPs can integrate structured data such as IP addresses and malware signatures alongside unstructured data such as threat reports and emails. All of which gives security teams access to more detailed intelligence across their digital assets.
By enabling security teams to efficiently integrate threat intelligence into the wider enterprise security infrastructure, TIPs enable financial services firms to move to a proactive and highly targeted threat prevention and mitigation approach.
Powering up participation in industry-wide collaboration models
TIPs also facilitate the seamless two-way exchange of threat intelligence with Sharing and Analysis Centres (ISACs) that facilitate the sharing of sector-specific real world threat intelligence among members.
Providing a central resource for gathering information on cyber threats, the FS-ISAC (https://www.fsisac.com/) organisation offers a real-time information sharing network that amplifies intelligence and knowledge between 5,000 member firms worldwide. Sourced directly from member financial firms across regional and industry segments, the FS-ISAC delivers tactical and strategic security alerts that detail indicators of compromise, TTPs, threats information via automated feeds.
Financial firms with TIPs benefit from being able to fully participate in the bi-directional threat intelligence sharing that enhances their overall resilience to new threats and helps the wider industry peer group. By collaborating in this collective real-time intelligence model, organisations are able to significantly elevate how they meet specific security challenges head on.
It’s time to TIP the balance
With the increase in threats, leading to quicker alert fatigue, security teams need all the help they can get in deciphering which threats need their attention, and which can be resolved through automated responses.
By enabling integration with other security systems, a process known as cyber fusion, TIPs enable financial services firms to ensure their defences are streamlined and aligned and that their security teams can proactively identify and respond to emerging threats. Even better, they can ensure that enriched threat intelligence is instantly disseminated to multiple internal SOC teams as well as trusted external sharing communities such as ISACs. All of which leads to a more coordinated and efficient response to security incidents and a better informed and proactive security posture.