By Anuj Goel, CEO at Cyware
Financial institutions are facing a unique uphill battle when it comes to addressing the ever-evolving threat landscape. Not only do they hold some of the most sensitive information, but they experience a flurry of attempted attacks every single day. Earlier this year the largest bank in the United States, JPMorgan, reported that it fends off 45 billion cyberattack attempts every 24 hours.
In this environment, it’s vital that institutions within the financial sector maintain a high level of visibility across all their assets, regardless of their location or infrastructure. Organisations need to ensure that they are continually assessing and optimising their security operations and the utilisation of their infrastructure and teams.
To unify the diverse components of a modern cybersecurity strategy, security leaders are increasingly turning to Cyber Fusion Centers (CFCs), an approach that allows organisations to integrate their various security functions far more efficiently than traditional methods. It’s for these reasons that so many major banks have chosen to build CFCs.
Enhanced Visibility and Efficiency
One of the primary benefits of CFCs is improved visibility. By centralising threat intelligence and security analytics, financial institutions can achieve comprehensive visibility of the threat landscape and significantly reduce response times to potential threats.
Additionally, CFCs allow organisations to develop customised security strategies. With CFC-enabled workflows, security teams can continually adapt their response plans to address changing threat landscape and growing attack surface.
Key Use Cases for Cyber Fusion Centers
In the financial sector, Cyber Fusion Centers are crucial for strengthening defence mechanisms and enhancing operational efficiency. They address a wide range of important use cases:
- Threat Intel Operationalisation: CFCs draw on both external (commercial threat intelligence, ISAC advisories, OSINT sources, etc) and internal (SIEM, EDR, IDS/IPS, etc) threat intelligence to steer security processes to proactively defeat potential threats.
- Threat Correlation and Analysis: By bringing together data from various sources, CFCs facilitate comprehensive incident impact assessment and in-depth investigations.
- Information Sharing: They facilitate real-time information exchange within an organisation, encouraging cross-functional collaboration.
- Cyber/Physical Incident Response: CFCs enable round-the-clock incident response, allowing the actioning of enriched, anonymised threat intelligence after internal contextualisation.
- Intel Collaboration: They foster collaboration by permitting security operation team members to request information on specific threats and collect intelligence based on these RFIs, enhancing cooperation amongst security teams.
- Threat Response Automation: CFCs utilise orchestration and automation platforms (SOAR) to expedite threat response, deploying automated, cross-functional workflows across infrastructures.
- Vulnerability Management: They automate workflows to promptly prioritise vulnerabilities and patch those which are most critical, preventing potential exploitation.
- Threat Hunting: CFCs enable proactive threat hunting, particularly in legacy systems, using known vulnerability indicators to initiate response actions.
- Crisis Communication: During a cybersecurity crisis, CFCs ensure rapid response and communication coordination across all stakeholders.
- Financial Fraud Response: They automate the detection and response to financial fraud leading to cyber events, leveraging intelligence from diverse sources to correlate and analyse malicious activities.
Given the diverse range of responsibilities that consume the time and resources of a typical security team, integrating these elements is crucial. Without a cohesive approach, security leaders in the financial sector will struggle to keep up with the dynamic nature of cyber threats. By embracing Cyber Fusion Centers, financial institutions can stay ahead of evolving risks and enhance their overall security posture.