14 DAY TRIAL // With the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, corporate cybersecurity resilience has been challenged. Cybercriminals have targeted the financial sector on numerous occasions, and this pattern is expected to continue.
As reported by a recent study, before COVID-19 attackers specifically targeted security vulnerabilities in financial services businesses because the majority of staff had to leave work at the end of the day. Financial Security Board (FSB) have revealed that the COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the importance of enhancing resilience in the face of rapid economic, financial and technological change.
While outsourcing to third-party service providers, such as cloud computing, looks to improve the operational resilience of financial institutions, a growing reliance on those services can result in new challenges and weaknesses. It is vital to have effective risk management throughout the supply chain if you want to reduce operational and cyber risks.
In only 14 months, cyberattacks skyrocketed from 5,000 per week to 200,000 per week
According to cybersecurity researchers, the number of malware, phishing, and ransomware attacks increased from approximately 5,000 per week in February 2020 to more than 200,000 per week by the end of April 2021. Moreover, they came to the conclusion that it is no longer safe to rely solely on virtual private networks (VPNs) and insecure wireless connections due to new challenges in patching and other cybersecurity issues.
Dependence on a few third parties can lead to a single point of failure with potentially damaging effects for financial firms. This is especially important during the Covid-19 pandemic because the concentration risk has increased significantly. Even more, access to and monitoring of information from these providers complicates the management of such risks by financial institutions.
The current environment necessitates changes in financial services businesses' cyber risk management practices, incident response, and recovery efforts, as well as cloud and third-party services management. Despite the fact that operational resilience has increased as a result of their rapid adoption of new technologies, cyber resilience can be improved.