When it comes to high-value assets, few industries can come close to financial services. It’s not just the obvious fact that banks are giant warehouses of money—banks represent critical pieces of infrastructure that entire economies rely upon.

Some of today’s largest financial institutions have more app developers than bankers. The way these companies interact with customers is by providing application experiences, since fewer and fewer customers want to actually venture into brick and mortar branches. The issue is complicated further by the fact that most banks are decades-old institutions, meaning they may be working with a range of technologies developed over the past 30 years.

This explosion of apps is a critical factor in such a security-dependent industry, creating a wealth of new insertion points for attacks. When customers use a banking app on their phone, there’s the app on the device, interacting with systems in the cloud, transmitted over networks, passing through all the traditional soft spots along the way. Recent reports indicate that half of banks say they’ve experienced data breaches or system downtime. As advanced as security is in the financial industry, clearly there’s still some catching up to do.

Read the full article published February 20, 2020 here: https://www.securityweek.com/attacking-organism-financial-services by SecurityWeek.