Global cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab has reported that financial institutions have ramped up their investments on security for information technology (IT) amid growing risks of cybercrime.
Security investment has been a high priority for banks and other financial institutions as they experience cyberattacks on their own infrastructure and customers.
Financial Institutions Security Risks research of Kaspersky Lab said retail banks spend three times as much on IT security compared to nonfinancial institutions.
Sixty-four percent of banks admitted that they will invest on improving their IT security regardless of return of investment to meet the growing demands of government regulators, top management and their customers.
Protecting the full extent of IT infrastructure ranging from traditional to specialized, ATMs and point of sale terminals has been proven difficult amid changing threat landscape which provides opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit vulnerabilities which might compromise data security.
The report showed that mobile banking has been exposed to new cyberthreats. 42 percent of banks predict that majority of their customers will use mobile banking within three years but admitted that their clients are too careless in their online behavior.
Majority of the banks surveyed admitted that their customers are frequently under attack from hackers with 70 percent also reporting financial fraud which results to monetary loss.
Rising incidents of data breaches on customers have led to banks reviewing their security efforts.
Sixty-one percent of respondents see improving the security of apps and websites 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.
Banks are also concerned on targeted attacks as they become rampant with malware as a service platforms being used to harm financial organizations.
“Combatting the constantly changing threats targeting their own IT infrastructure and customer accounts is an everyday challenge for financial institutions. To put an effective response in place – that protects all points of vulnerability – requires the financial services industry to have several key components: build a highly integrated anti-targeted attacks protection, embrace multi-channel anti-fraud security and get actionable intelligence on evolving threats,” Veniamin Levtsov, Vice President of Enterprise Business at Kaspersky Lab said in a statement.
Moreover, sharing threat intelligence would help banks identify new and emerging threats quickly considering the low levels of concern banks have about some of their most vulnerable devices, such as ATMs. Sharing more third party intelligence could help banks prepare for threats that they may not otherwise expect. (PNA)