By Craig Evans, Threat Detection and Response Manager, NormCyber
Cyber attacks are here to stay and are mounting in severity by the day. Already in 2025, a wave of devastating breaches has paralysed UK businesses, with leaders confronted by crippling ransom demands. For criminals, the financial sector is the ultimate prize: holding vast sums of money, high-value data, and time-sensitive operations that leave no room for disruption.
Recent industry research places finance as the second most expensive industry for breaches, with average incident costs hitting $5.5 million this year alone. Attackers are exploiting the sector with AI-driven phishing, targeted transaction interception, and sophisticated ransomware strains.
So, why does resilience keep failing – and how can financial services prepare?
The resilience gap: what’s going wrong
Despite being one of the most targeted sectors, many financial services firms still lack the basics. The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found half of financial services organisations have no formal incident response plan. This is in spite of growing scrutiny from insurers, regulators, and accreditors who increasingly see resilience as non-negotiable.
Even when attacks occur, too many firms stand still. Over a third (36%) of affected organisations take no action to prevent recurrence, leaving the same gaps open to exploitation. That inertia is a gift to criminals.
Specialist support is critical here. Managed security partners and incident response firms can help organisations harden defences, identify blind spots, and stop repeat attacks. It is then surprising that only 15% of organisations are using NCSC-approved incident response companies. Without expert scrutiny of incident response methodologies, firms risk compounding the damage that extends the initial breach impact.
Trading panic for protocol in incident response
To close the resilience gap, financial services organisations must adopt strategies covering the full spectrum of security. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but using a mix of monitoring, education, and testing can help organisations improve their cyber resilience.
During a cyber incident, hackers count on their victims making rash decisions out of fear and panic. Defining roles, procedures and protocols across the organisation ensures that everyone – from IT teams to executive leadership – understands their part in an attack scenario. When procedures align, teams can contain threats much faster before they can spiral out of control.
But planning alone isn’t enough. Leading organisations are increasingly turning to immersive simulations and tabletop exercises to pressure-test plans. Done well, these exercises replicate real-world attack conditions, uncover blind spots, and build muscle memory that pays dividends in the real thing.
Building resilience through confidence
Instilling confidence is key if financial services organisations want to embed cyber resilience into their broader strategy. From the ground up, this means that every employee needs to act with conviction in the face of threats. Top-down, it requires leadership to separate noise and false-positives from actual threats that pose a real danger to business operations. To bridge this dual challenge, more financial services organisations are adopting sophisticated security operations that unify and simplify threat intelligence to facilitate informed decision-making.
Cyber resilience is so much more than an IT issue. Forward-thinking financial services organisations treat resilience as a competitive advantage, ensuring business continuity, protecting customer trust, and meeting regulatory expectations.
Act now or pay later
As cyber threats grow in scale and sophistication, financial services organisations can no longer afford reactive thinking. Cyber resilience must be embedded into the fabric of operations, not bolted on in a crisis.
That doesn’t mean ripping out existing systems. It means urgently upgrading weak points and investing in tailored support, rigorous planning, and tested response frameworks. By empowering leaders to make informed decisions in the moments that matter most, organisations can reduce the impact of inevitable attacks and build long-term trust with customers and stakeholders.
In a sector where the stakes are so high, the greatest cost isn’t the breach itself, it’s the inaction that lets it happen again.
