Finance
Detecting network security breaches for financial institutions
Published by maria gbaf
Posted on January 14, 2022
5 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by maria gbaf
Posted on January 14, 2022
5 min readLast updated: January 28, 2026
Financial institutions face high cybercrime risks. Effective network monitoring and compliance are key to preventing security breaches.
By Mark Towler, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Progress
The financial services industry is most acutely at risk from cybercrime – as, according to Forbes, 35% of all data breaches impact the financial services industry. The economy relies on the finance industry, which now depends on technology. Financial data is valuable and enticing, and the complexity of financial IT systems, with so many connections, creates a vast attack surface. Cybersecurity has become a priority tech investment to secure assets and effective network monitoring is critical.
Security breaches are a common and expensive problem for banks and other financial organisations. A Vanson Bourne survey of 100 UK financial services decision makers illustrates that cyberattacks are becoming more prevalent, reporting that 70% were hit by a security incident within twelve months. On top of that, an Accenture study found that the average annualised cost associated with data breaches for financial services companies globally has increased to $18.5 million.
When it comes to the banking sector, there are specific risks and vulnerabilities within the customer journey and within mobile banking apps. ImmuniWeb studied external web applications, APIs and mobile applications of the S&P Global list (the world’s largest financial organisations across 22 countries). ImmuniWeb found that 91% of mobile banking apps contain at least one medium risk security vulnerability. Key security risks lie within the business, as Vanson Bourne reported that most incidents stemmed “from employees failing to follow security protocol or data protection policies.”
Let’s look first at the main security and compliance pain points, starting with compliance. Being cavalier in taking care of data has multiple knock-on effects for organisations, such as compliance violations, regulatory violations, and significant fines. Identities and authentication can also cause huge concern as financial institutions need to ensure secure, credential-based access to data and employees, as well as shielding their entire tech ecosystem. Bad news travels fast in our digital era. A security story about customer privacy breaches can be reputation-damaging which costs organisations immeasurable reputational repair time.
How does network monitoring solve security and compliance pain points?
The financial services industry is particularly hot on compliance documentation and record-keeping. Continual network monitoring can collect and analyse vital data points and report any suspicious activity to the IT team, thus averting a breach. Compliance requires effective reporting, particularly on information relating to a security incident, and network monitoring can provide analysis of archived logs that explain what happened.
Accessing an internal IT system is every financial hacker’s dream. A robust network monitoring solution will show all the network elements as well as configurations and access permissions – and alert IT if any of them are changed. It is vital to maximise security and protect all assets with a strong two-step authentication process.
To address this, the most sophisticated network monitoring tools allow the set-up of notifications and alerts for changes to the configurations of network devices, as well as the ability to audit configurations against defined policies. It’s hard to know where to start with many solutions available, but it’s important to choose a tool which has the following key features:
How to choose the best network monitoring tool
The common mistake of alert overload
There are some alarmingly common mistakes that financial services companies are making, which can overwhelm IT and could be dealt with more simply by having the right network monitoring in place. Typical IT alerting tools installed by banks can overwhelm IT, with Ovum research of banks finding that 73% have at least 25 separate security tools. Ovum found that 40% of banks receive an average of 160,000 mistaken or irrelevant alerts every day.
We’d recommend making sure alerts only go out when someone has to log in and do something. If you are sending out an email from the monitoring system, and no one had to log in and do something – you are spamming them and should reconfigure the system. Note that particularly sophisticated network monitoring solutions can not only identify device dependencies to reduce alert storms but can also implement self-healing actions (like restarting a device) that can resolve network issues without IT intervention.
The article discusses detecting network security breaches in financial institutions and the importance of cybersecurity.
Financial services are frequently targeted by cybercriminals due to the value of financial data and complex IT systems.
Network monitoring helps detect suspicious activities, ensuring compliance and preventing breaches by alerting IT teams.
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