When we look at the number of cyber attacks and the sectors targeted by attackers in recent years, we see that one of the most heavily targeted sectors is the finance sector. According to the newly announced 2020 cyber reports, the importance of IT managers working in the financial industry is increasing. But what is the source of the increase in cyberattacks against the financial industry?
The financial sector has become vulnerable to phishing attacks due to transactions that have been renewed due to the pandemic and increasingly moved to digital. The advanced internet-based facilities available to customers seem to have worked for hackers too. Also, with the transition to the remote working system, the number of phishing attacks caused by employee errors has increased. That’s why organizations should think once more when taking steps to adapt to new developments. When adding internet-based applications to their programs, they should also add cybersecurity measures to accompany them.
Here Are 4 Reasons Behind The Increase in Cyberattacks Against Financial Industry:
Hackers take advantage of advanced technologies in their attacks.
Deepfake and 5G technology are among the most abused technologies. With developing technology, hackers discover these new tools and use them in their phishing attacks. In recent years, deepfake technology has been used the most in attacks. 5G technology came in second place. The financial sector especially has started to use these tools with the widespread use of Fintechs, Blockchain, and Bitcoin technologies. These developments also brought risks.
Hackers continue to hack into people’s bank accounts using their credentials.
The main reason these attackers target the financial sector. Most operations that have been transferred to the internet with the pandemic also seem to be greatly affected. There is a serious increase in phishing attacks due to internal transactions conducted over the Internet. In addition, Smishing and Vishing among the most common methods hackers have used during the pandemic period when attacking customers. Another incident most frequently abused by hackers is government support for small businesses. Taking advantage of this development, hackers who seized many users’ credentials used this information to attack their bank accounts.
The new models changed with the pandemic period created new cybersecurity problems.
Data theft and data manipulation are among the new cybersecurity problems that most concern the financial sector. Now, hackers have become interested not only in stealing data but also in manipulating them. Accordingly, after the attackers steal the information, they either change it or replace it with completely different information. This causes anxiety in customers. Moreover, in recent years, we have seen that some phishing attacks go beyond changing data. In some phishing attacks, hackers encrypt the company’s data and then demand a ransom to crack the password.
Banks and other financial service providers use complex supply chains.
In 2020, these chains evolved further and became multi-stage and interconnected. These developments make things easier while also creating new areas for hackers to target. With these developments, supply chain attacks, whose number has been increasing steadily, reached serious levels by 2020. One reason for the increase in phishing attacks is that hackers are now targeting service providers such as MSPs, CSPs, and TSPs. These attacks against service providers were usually carried out using ransomware.
1. Educate your employees on the threats they could face when remote working.
Remote working is a new challenge for companies. People can be careless and more prone to make mistakes when working from home. So, it’s best if you educate the employees on the threats they could face online. Use our cybersecurity awareness training programs to get faster and effective results. We offer you tons of training content like HTML5 Security Training and Animation Training Videos. We also support you with extra materials such as Posters, Screensavers, Cyber Security Newsletters, Phishing Security Tips, Ninjio Animation Training Videos, gamified security awareness training. You can see an increase in the cybersecurity awareness levels of your employees after using our tool.
2. Respond quickly to any attack using incident response tools.
One of the key points of cybersecurity is identifying attacks quickly and taking the necessary actions. Remote working makes it harder for your employees to communicate directly in case of an emergency. Use our incident response tool to establish an easier system for attack reporting. Everybody can use Incident Responder, and it has a user-friendly interface. Your employees can report harmful messages via an Outlook or browser plugin with one click. We analyze the content of the message and report it back to you in case of anything suspicious. This way, you can implement your solutions right away.
“This post is originally published at www.phishing.org.uk”
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