International. More than a year into the pandemic, banks, insurers and other financial institutions are reporting the costly consequences of not being able to protect their huge amounts of data from cloud-based attacks and network disruptions, according to Infoblox research, on how the pandemic challenged the financial services industry's core infrastructure.
Based on more than 800 responses from IT professionals working in the financial services industry in North America, Latin America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region, the report highlights:
• Data breaches are an increasingly significant cost burden for the industry: Worldwide, financial firms that experienced a data breach reported estimated average losses of about $4.2 million per attack, and U.S. organizations were hit the hardest with $4.7 million in estimated losses.
• Network outages also result in costly burdens: institutions lose an estimated average of US$3.2 million with Asia-Pacific followed by European institutions bearing the biggest losses at US$4.3 million and US$3.1 million, respectively.
• The industry remains a popular target for cloud-based attacks: more than half of all organizations (54%) surveyed suffered a data breach in the past 12 months and 49% also suffered a cloud malware attack.
• Network- and cloud-based attacks will continue to be a major threat vector: more than 50% of respondents expect to face a combination of IoT attacks, cloud vulnerabilities, including misconfigurations, and data manipulation attempts over the next 12 months.
• Threat resolution teams are embracing network visibility for security: globally, network monitoring (76%), threat intelligence (64%), and threat hunting (57%) are considered the most effective mitigation tactics against these threats.
"The financial services sector has long been a target for bad actors following the trail of cyber money to the cloud," said Anthony James, vice president of product marketing at Infoblox. "As the pandemic pushed IT infrastructures to rely on remote work, cloud-based technologies that enabled digital transformation also created weak points for cybercriminals to exploit."
"This report shows us that cloud engagement has become the biggest cybersecurity issue for financial institutions and the investments they are making to protect themselves," James continued. "In particular, respondents are starting to use DNS to detect network threats before they move upward. This is reflected in the enhancement our customers are getting with our BloxOne Threat Defense platform, which uses DNS to extend security to cloud-first infrastructure and accelerates threat resolution by orchestrating detection and remediation tools from the existing security stack."
Download the report here.
