More than ever, financial institutions depend on web applications to maintain operations and partner with other enterprises to provide services to customers, but the significant rise in the number of cyber attacks targeted at this industry in the last few years has the potential to undermine consumer confidence not only in your organization but also across the wider industry. Today, financial services hold the unenviable distinction as the “most-breached sector”, with 35% of all data breaches occurring in that sector. We suspect they will be retaining this distinction: Imperva Threat Research Teams reported that between January and May 2021, web application attacks on the financial services sector increased 38%.
In the United States, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC), has developed an assessment tool to help financial institutions identify possible risks, assess their current plan, and evaluate it against cybersecurity risks. The Cybersecurity Assessment Tool (CAT) defines the proper controls an organization needs to improve and mitigate the risks, and to continually improve their overall security posture. It also lays out suggestions for a cybersecurity maturity model, which consists of five different domains and maturity levels. These are:
- Cyber Risk Management & Oversight
- Threat Intelligence & Collaboration
- Cybersecurity Controls
- External Dependency Management
- Cyber Incident Management & Resilience
To address and mitigate cyber attacks, financial organizations need solutions that can meet needed and planned controls found in both FFIEC and the NIST framework by offering data privacy, compliance, and security solutions from a single centralized platform. This provides clear visibility into any vulnerabilities or gaps in your security infrastructure and enables better risk management.
To see how Imperva application and data security solutions can help you complete a high level FFIEC CAT assessment in each of the five cybersecurity domains, download this easy-to-use checklist.
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