Financial Institutions Security Risks 2016, a survey of finance people on the security challenges for banks and financial institutions and the financial costs of specific cyberattacks, found costs are rising as organisations face increasingly sophisticated threats. The most-costly type of incident for financial organisations are threats that exploit vulnerabilities in point-of-sale (POS) systems, in which an organisation typically loses £1,658,161. Attacks on mobile devices are the second most costly (£1,314,933), followed by targeted attacks (£1,045,697), says the IT security product company Kaspersky Lab.
Compliance is the main driver for increasing investment in IT security in banks and financial institutions. However, the study found that 61 per cent of UK organisations believe that being compliant is not enough to be secure. Another significant reason for spending more on security is growing infrastructure complexity. For example, an average financial firm adopts virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and manages approximately 10,000 end user devices with roughly a half of them being mobile smartphones and tablets.
Insufficient internal expertise, top management directives and business expansion are also among the top reasons for a budget increase. In general, investing more in security appears to be inevitable to a clear majority of financial firms as 82 per cent of them expect an increase in their IT security budgets.
David Emm, pictured, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab said: “It is not surprising that financial organisations are looking to increase spending on security, given the substantial potential monetary losses from cyberattacks. Successful security strategies lie not just in spending on compliance, but in a multitude of cyber security solutions to minimise unauthorised access. This includes paying more attention to personal security awareness, getting better insights on the industry-specific threats and investing more in protection from advanced targeted attacks.”
Kaspersky with B2B International conducted a worldwide survey of more than 800 representatives from financial organisations in 15 countries.
