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Financial Industries Have Lots of Insider Threats Risks – Let’s See How

author
Published By Kumar Raj
Aswin Vijayan
Approved By Aswin Vijayan
Published On December 26th, 2018
Reading Time 5 Minutes Reading

In the financial industry, accountants and other officials are having role of managing, logging, and auditing the finance. They are properly trained in their respective education field regarding these common business activities. But, they are not trained with financial services cloud security. Just imagine a point – You are giving access to your online account to an individual for whom online data protection is totally a new topic. Do you think that he or she will be able to secure finance records? Lots of confusion in mind, Right? How to secure Financial data from insider threats?

Financial institutions are having lots of insider threats risks due to the lack of awareness among working officials. These humans pose a higher risk than external threats because employees are known with the location of firm’s ‘crown jewels’. The term ‘crown jewels’ means the assets, which cause the money flow, shareholder value, and competitive advantage. Of course, securing confidential information online might be at the top priority for financial industries. With the exploring of attacking platform, enterprises must seek for new technologies and updated strategies to secure sensitive content. Data is never safe on cloud, and especially in financial institutions, confidential data like account information – could be exploited at any time by users either with malicious intention or due to human errors.

Old Tradition Isn’t Going Out of the Fashion

Several financial industries have developed their off-premises security architecture in a broad manner. Traditional mitigation approaches like firewall, have been used for long years. But, now the world has completely changed – technology has evolved and things are changed from then and now. In today’s digitization world, traditional approaches are not at all enough to fight against today’s Cyberthreats. Financial industries have to understand one thing that ‘Traditional security measures are just for a baseline, new technologies are compulsorily required to achieve prevention against trending Cyberattacks.

However, there is a threat to confidential records from which you’ll go in shock state after hearing. The name of this threat is ‘Insider Threat’, which is caused by someone who is from the financial industry having privilege rights to access sensitive contents. Different surveys found that financial institutions are major target in the category of internal attacks. There are four different character’s types in this type of attack:

  1. Oblivious insiders
  2. Negligent insiders
  3. Malicious insiders
  4. Professional Insiders

Among all, the most common type is negligent insiders because this covers the individuals who are having ignorance attitude towards Cyber security. As per the current research report, it is being found that 86% of IT officials take insider threats as a purely cultural problem. In the year 2017, 46% of cybercrimes took place due to uninformed or careless staff, named as negligent insiders.

Its High Time for Financial Authorities To Wake Up – Don’t have blind faith in your employees! No one knows when one of the employees will become a threat to the financial industry. The cloud data security team in financial services should change their methodologies to deal with negligent insiders and most commonly insider Cyberthreats.

Ideas to Deal With Insider Threats in Financial Industry

As mentioned in the above section, technology is getting advanced day-by-day. The major benefit of the new innovations is taken properly by enterprises either in the financial domain, healthcare, or IT. With new innovations come the advancement in mitigation methods to fight against the inside threats. There exist two core techniques through which one can achieve prevention against internal Cybercrimes, and they are explained below:

  • Cloud DLP Solutions – In the financial industry, cloud-based data loss prevention techniques act as a strong buzzword for security purpose. We agree that there is not something new in this concept but, the technology has updated the things from DLP’s origin time till today’s date. All these updations are done to make a strong foundation in mitigation of insider threats. Well, DLP solutions is a set of rules and processes to keep confidential information safe at any cost. It classifies the firm’s most sensitive records, then defines the alerts based on certain rules to notify admins at the time of breach occurrence. With change in this, this prevention technique is getting more robust and useful for online data protection in businesses.
  • Data Monitoring System – Since the internal threats in financial industries are caused due to insiders, therefore, it is essential to adopt a data monitoring system in premises. This machine will keep authorities updated with the activities performed by employees on their confidential data. One can track the attitude of officials towards business through this monitoring system. Consolidated with DLP solutions, user operation analytics, and monitoring is a good approach to eliminate the chances of internal attacks. In majority cases, financial institutions face two major hurdles – on-time threat detection and meeting compliance. Now, both these hurdles can easily be crossed by enforcing DLP standards in premises and implementing a data monitoring system. Furthermore, both these technologies render forensic evidence that is important to complete audits like PCI DSS Compliance, GDPR Compliance, etc.

Get in Touch With CloudCodes To Just Stop Insider Threats

Apart from the technologies provided in this post to secure data from internal attacks, there also exists more cloud security measures. User behavior analytic, privileged access management, machine learning, etc., can be adapted to eliminate the risks of external as well as insider threats. Implementing these solutions one-by-one is not at all an intelligent idea to protect online data. The smart way is to adopt a consolidated solution through which administrators can achieve all online data protection practices in just one attempt. Financial industries can choose the CloudCodes solution – an integrated platform for cloud security. This solution is dedicated to the protection of content stored online with strong and updated security measures. In comparison to others, this solution requires less human involvement to deal with Cyber threats.