Table of Contents
1. The Cyber Threat Landscape in Financial Services
2. The Limitations of Traditional Security Measures
3. Why Full Network Visibility is Essential
4. How Network Detection and Response (NDR) Strengthens Cybersecurity
5. Reducing Network Blind Spots in Financial Services
6. Regulatory Compliance and Network Security
Data is money in the financial services industry. Literally. Where institutions are processing millions of transactions every day, they are the prime target for cyberattacks. With an arsenal of tools available today in cybersecurity, most organizations miss one critical thing: network traffic. And that’s precisely where cybercriminals take advantage of this weakness and get catastrophic breaches of sensitive data with damage to services and reputations.
Network traffic monitoring is no longer a choice but a necessity for financial institutions. This write-up discusses why the absence of network traffic monitoring presents a risk and how Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions may complete that gap in the cybersecurity defenses of the organization.
1. The Cyber Threat Landscape in Financial Services
Financial institutions have always been sizzling targets for cybercriminals. Boasting lucrative assets like customer data and critical financial systems, they remain a tempting target. Recent high-profile breaches, in fact, have demonstrated how vulnerable these organizations are.
For example, the U.S. wing of a major Chinese bank experienced a ransomware attack last year that shuttered trades on the U.S. Treasury market. Incidents like this illustrate the many ways cybercriminals—gangs to states—are continually refining their craft to target financial services.
Adding to the above are hybrid work environments and ramped cloud adoption. Expanding their digital footprint, financial institutions increase their attack surface with every new deployment, which gives malicious actors opportunities to gain access, with many threats not being detected as no network traffic monitoring takes place.
2. The Limitations of Traditional Security Measures
The majority of financial institutions make use of some form of EDR system combined with a traditional firewall-based setup to secure their IT environment. These tools form an important element in the strong cybersecurity strategy, though they are insufficient as an individual component, particularly when it comes to detecting network-level threats.
Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) is more about tracking the activity of the endpoint device, whether in the form of a server, laptop, or even a mobile phone. However, EDRs narrow down their scope, and many cases of threats through network traffic go unobserved, especially when an attacker moves laterally between devices or systems.
Firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can really shut out known threats but fall short of the progressing attacks based on unknown vulnerabilities.
Another reason why full network visibility is important is that traditional security tools generate so many false alarms that overwhelm security teams, and this phenomenon is called “alert fatigue.” This situation makes it challenging for security analysts to identify the noise from the real threats, causing delay in the detection and response processes.
3. Why Full Network Visibility is Essential
Network traffic is the blood that circulates through the veins of every financial institution’s operations. Even though the data is transferred between the departments of an institution or with clients and partners outside, it carries precious information about the well-being and security of your organization’s systems.
Why is network traffic monitoring critical?
Uncovering Hidden Threats: One would also discover hidden threats by monitoring the network traffic. This would reveal unnatural behaviors of users, which the EDRs may not be able to capture. For example, a successful attacker may begin to move laterally in the network, probing other more valuable assets.
Detecting Anomalies Early: Early detection of such anomalies may be evident in suspicious network traffic, data being transferred to unknown external locations as a component of some data exfiltration attempt.
Combatting Insider Threats: In this case, the risk factor is huge because of the presence of internal actors either by design or mistake. Network monitoring may alert the security team of some unauthorized access or anomalous usage patterns on the part of employees.
4. How Network Detection and Response (NDR) Strengthens Cybersecurity
What is NDR?
NDR refers to network detection and response. It is a cybersecurity solution involving real-time network traffic monitoring and analysis with detection capabilities that identify unusual behavior that can be indicative of security threats. EDR, on the other hand, focuses mainly on endpoint devices, while NDR offers full visibility in the entire network, covering environments that are on-premises, cloud-based, or a hybrid infrastructure.
Here’s how NDR strengthens financial institutions’ cybersecurity:
Real-Time Threat Detection: NDR tools are always scanning for suspicious network activity, keeping financial institutions ahead of attackers.
Proactive Threat Hunting: With modern systems, NDR brings together machine learning and behavioral analytics to identify unknown threats that traditional tools miss. The added value from these solutions puts actionable insight in the hands of security teams so they can proactively hunt for threats before they escalate.
Automated Triage: NDR solutions by default prioritize alerts based on the threat severity level and confidence in the detected threat, thereby reducing noise and helping SOC teams focus on real, high-risk incidents, which can further ease alert fatigue.
5. Reducing Network Blind Spots in Financial Services
Financial services have been left with legacy infrastructures, creating deep blind spots in their network visibility. The infrastructures are not effective enough to handle some of the sophisticated attacks present today.
Implementation of NDR solutions can provide financial institutions with a robust understanding of their networks across all their sites. This would become important both in searching for external threats and in defending internal systems so as to ensure sensitive customer data is safe from improper access.
Key areas to monitor include:
Cloud environments: As financial services transition much to the cloud, monitoring traffic between on-premises and cloud systems will become increasingly critical.
Remote and branch offices: Financial organizations with a few physical locations have a duty to ensure their networks are constantly being monitored across all the sites.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies: As employees access systems from personal devices, network traffic monitoring will be essential to identify unknown or high-risk behaviors.
6. Regulatory Compliance and Network Security
Banks and other financial institutions usually operate under strict compliance standards and are accordingly covered by other regulatory requirements such as Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), among others that strictly enforce the need for intense monitoring of data streams concerning information safety.
Beyond keeping users in compliance, these NDR tools help ensure that users actually meet the requirements of compliance. A useful side effect of these tools is maintaining a robust audit trail of network activity. Should a breach occur, those logs will be invaluable in determining what went wrong and, for regulators, proving compliance.
Closing Remarks
The increasing complexity of the cybersecurity landscape simply cannot be ignored with respect to financial service organizations. Integrating network detection and response into the cybersecurity strategy in financial institutions will arm institutions with long-needed network visibility to identify and respond to threats before it’s too late.
Monitoring network traffic is no longer a discretionary activity today as cyberattacks grow more sophisticated day by day. Right now, financial institutions have to pay even more attention to network monitoring to protect their treasured assets and confidential information from this ever-increasing threat landscape.
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