By  Anthony Perridge, VP International, ThreatQuotient

More than three billion people around the world use social media each month, with 90 percent of those users accessing their chosen platforms via mobile devices. While, historically, financial services (FinServ) institutions discouraged the use of social media, it has become a channel that can no longer be ignored.

FinServ institutions are widely recognised as leaders in cybersecurity, employing layers of defence and highly skilled security experts to protect their organisations. But as the attack surface expands with the growing use of social media and external digital platforms, many FinServ security teams are blind to a new wave of digital threats outside the firewall.

Social media is a morass of information flooding the Internet with billions of posts per day that comprise text, images, hashtags and different types of syntax. It is as broad as it is deep and requires an equally broad and deep combination of defences to identify and mitigate the risk it presents.

Understanding prevalent social media threats

Analysis of prevalent social media risks shows the breadth and depth of these types of attacks. A deeper understanding of how bad actors are using social media and digital platforms for malicious purposes is extremely valuable as FinServ institutions strive to strengthen their defense-in-depth architectures and mitigate risk to their institutions, brands, employees and customers.

To gain visibility, reduce risk and automate protection, leaders in the financial industry are expanding their threat models to include these threat vectors. They are embracing a data-driven approach that uses automation and machine learning to keep pace with these persistent and continuously evolving threats, automatically finding fraudulent accounts, spear phishing attacks, customer scams, exposed personally identifiable information (PII), account takeovers and more.

They are aggregating this data into a central repository so that their threat intelligence teams can trace attacks back to malicious profiles, posts, comments or pages, as well as pivot between these different social media objects for context. Network security teams can block their users from accessing malicious social objects to help prevent attacks, and incident response teams can compare their organisation’s telemetry of incidents with known indicators of compromise to mitigate damage.

Employee education is also a critical component of standard defences. Raising awareness of these threats through regular training and instituting policies to improve social media security hygiene with respect to company and personal accounts goes a long way to preventing these attacks in the first place.

A Checklist for Financial Institutions

This checklist that encompasses people, process and technology will go a long way toward helping FinServ security teams better protect their institutions, brands, employees and customers.

1. IDENTIFY the institution’s social media and digital footprint, including accounts for the company, brands, locations, executives and key individuals.
2. OBTAIN “Verified Accounts” for company and brand accounts on social media. This provides assurance to customers that they are interacting with legitimate accounts and prevents impersonators from usurping a “Verified Account.”
3. ENABLE two-factor authentication for social media accounts to deter hijacking and include corporate and brand social media accounts in IT password policy requirements.
4. MONITOR for spoofed and impersonator accounts and, when malicious, arrange for takedown
5. IDENTIFY scams, fraud, money-flipping and more by monitoring for corporate and brand social media pages.
6. MONITOR for signs of corporate and executive social media account hijacking. Early warning indicators are important to protecting the organisation’s brand.
7. DEPLOY employee training and policies on social media security hygiene.
8. INCORPORATE a social media and digital threat feed into a threat intelligence platform as part of an overall defense-in-depth approach. This allows teams to ingest, correlate and take action faster on attacks made against their institution via social media.

Conclusion

FinServ institutions and their customers use many different social networks to communicate and conduct business but are often blind to the risk bad actors present as they increasingly targeting these public, uncontrolled channels to commit financial fraud, damage brands and even pose physical threats.

FinServ security teams need visibility into digital threats outside the firewall and actionable information to reduce risk and automate protection. Those that are most successful have a defense-in-depth architecture that includes intelligence on social and digital threats, context to understand what threats pose the greatest risk, and the ability to build on existing processes and workflows to block more threats and accelerate remediation.