While cybersecurity is an ongoing focus for financial institutions, numerous banks ignore one of the biggest threats: insider threats. Not all cyberattacks come from external hackers, despite popular belief. Many of these are insiders — malicious, negligent, or compromised credentials.
This blog discusses the various types of insider threat cyber security threats facing banks, why they are such appealing targets, and how digital evidence specialists and other modern technologies can reduce these risks.
Not all insider threats in banking come from rogue employees stealing data. They can be broadly categorized into three groups:
Those individuals who create and misuse their access to sensitive systems for their own benefit or to harm the organization. They might be disgruntled employees or corporate spies, or they could be individuals recruited by criminal hacking groups.
Employees who unintentionally create security vulnerabilities by using weak passwords, clicking on phishing scams, or misusing sensitive data also present serious risks. The most conventional type of insider threat cyber security
Hackers frequently focus on employees, contractors, or others with access to critical systems, pilfering their credentials to evade security features and penetrate banks’ networks.
According to the 2022 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report:
With the average cost of a banking data breach reaching $5.97 million per incident, banks cannot afford to ignore these growing risks.
Some factors make banks especially prone to cyber security incidents from insider threats:
Banks have been rapidly expanding to offer more convenient services to customers. But this evolution does not come without its own set of challenges, like increased potential risks and vulnerabilities due to digitization.
Although cloud solutions allow for unlimited scaling, if not implemented well, with no security controls, banks’ systems may become vulnerable to insider threats.
Remote work has increased the use of personal systems to access company information and unsecured networks, expanding the attack surface for cybercriminals.
Modern threats are not captured by traditional security tools, so just like banks invest in physical loss prevention experts, it is imperative to invest in digital evidence specialists as well as advanced detection systems.
While banks spend heavily on cybersecurity, many invest more in trying to prevent breaches than in detecting them. But in cases where prevention does not hold up, strong insider threat cyber security solutions are critical for detection and mitigation in real-time.
For instance, hacker groups such as Lapsus have breached big corporations through the social engineering of employees and by abusing stolen credentials to dump critical systems.
In order to do this, when it comes to banking, they need an adaptive detection system, based on user behaviour, that tracks actions taken by the user in actual time and recognizes nonstandard practices.
Utilizing Behaviour Analytics for Insider Threat Detection Detecting insider threats requires organizations to be intimately familiar with standard user behaviour. By creating a behavioural baseline, financial institutions can tell the difference between routine and suspicious activities.
A bank utilizing the ECS Security Operations Platform successfully detected an insider threat when a user accessed multiple accounts from different continents within a short timeframe. The system flagged this behaviour as an anomaly, triggering alerts within hours.
Behaviour analytics can:
By leveraging AI-powered analytics, banks can proactively mitigate insider threats before significant damage occurs.
All attacks have a beginning, middle and end. Unfortunately, by the time a breach is detected, attackers have often found a deep entrance to banking systems.
Using tools like Smart Timeline, banks can visually track lateral movement within their networks, reducing the time security teams spend correlating events manually. This approach improves response times and minimizes financial and reputational damage.
The cyber security risks of insider threats should never be ignored by banks. Using behaviour-based monitoring, AI-driven detection tools, and teaming with digital evidence specialist
Financial institutions can:
✔ Distinguish between normal and abnormal user behaviour
✔ Perform real-time analysis of large quantities of security data
✔ Minimise alert fatigue among security teams
✔ Provide comprehensive investigation and mitigation of insider threats
Taking a proactive approach to insider threat cyber security is essential for banks to protect customer data and maintain trust. Investing in digital evidence specialists and modern security technologies will be crucial in the fight against insider threats.