Financial Services Threat Trends
Reputational trust is vital to the strength of financial institutions. A single cyberattack can dismantle years of brand building. Significant financial losses in the form of theft, fraud, and operational disruptions can all stem from threats like phishing sites, look-alike domains, social media impersonations, fake mobile apps, etc.
According to Fortra research, the financial industry is the top targeted industry for creating phishing threats, social media threats, and for harvesting stolen account credentials on the dark web. These threats can be exacerbated by the everyday challenges plaguing financial institution cybersecurity teams. These challenges include compliance risks, inefficient data management, and lack of security or transparency in transactions.
Fortra’s PhishLabs can navigate the evolving landscape of financial cyber threats with your organizations.
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Proactively Disrupt Fraud: Detect and Prevent
The list of cybersecurity threats aimed at financial institutions is daunting due in part to the treasure trove the financial industry remains for threat actors. But what are these threats and how do they directly impact financial institutions?
Brand impersonations for fraudulent purposes, along with VIP or executive impersonations aimed at manipulating audiences (such as encouraging investments or damaging a financial institution's reputation), are increasingly common. Additionally, there are numerous cases of outright fraud, where individuals attempt to sell credentials and accounts they’ve obtained from the dark web, which they often market through widely used social media channels.
The threats plaguing financial institutions:
Phishing Sites
A hoax website built to mimic a financial institution’s brand with the intention of misleading visitors to give up personal data such as usernames, passwords and financial information. See how PhishLabs Customer Phishing Protection proactively detects phishing sites.
Fake Mobile Apps
Impersonation of a banking app to fool customers and steal data, such as login information, deliver malware, and carry out other malicious objectives. Protect your customers and brand with PhishLabs Mobile App Protection.
Social Media
Impersonating a social media account created to mislead customers, provide bogus financial advice, or trick people for malicious purposes. Threat actors will use profile photos, including that of an executive, and usernames similar to the account they are spoofing. Learn about PhishLabs Social Media Protection.
Look-alike Domains
A spoofed domain intended to fool users into thinking it’s the legitimate domain. The domain can look like the real domain but may have subtle differences, ex: “0” versus “o.” Get comprehensive protection from look-alike domains with PhishLabs Domain Monitoring.
Compromised Credentials on the Dark Web
Credentials (employee and customers) obtained by someone other than the owner. These compromised credentials could be usernames, passwords, and any other authentic credentials exposed from a cybersecurity breach and sold on the dark web for nefarious purposes. Learn more about PhishLabs Compromised Credentials Monitoring.
Account Takeover
Unauthorized access to an online account usually obtained through compromised credentials. Take down phishing threats with PhishLabs Customer Phishing Protection.
Expanded Visibility into Compromised Credentials
Use of stolen data leads the way in tactical use for threat actors as it’s valuable in creating cyberattacks. These compromised credentials can wreak havoc on all organizations through data breaches, reputational damage, and account takeovers. However, financial data tends to be the dominating data found on the dark web. Stolen credit data, BIN numbers, and combo lists (combinations of account creds, passwords, logins, emails and/or bank account numbers, or credit card numbers, etc.) are common threats.
While it may not be possible to keep data off the dark web, having the power to monitor credentials on the dark web is critical to prevent attacks.
This is easier said than done for a security team considering the multiple burdens they face including lack of broad visibility, access, and knowledge. Threat actors keep moving despite an organization’s cybersecurity obstacles.
Fortra’s Compromised Credentials Monitoring delivers broad visibility into stolen employee and customer credentials revealed from dark web sites and harvested from third-party leaks, infostealers, botnets, and other forms of malware. This allows your financial organization to quickly respond and implement countermeasures, such as forced password resets and lockouts to guard against potential account takeovers, breaches, and malware attacks.
Learn more about Compromised Credentials Monitoring
Threat Mitigation Techniques
PhishLabs delivers the most comprehensive and effective mitigation in the industry with unlimited takedowns. By combining takedown, browser-blocking, and integration with internal security controls, we ensure threats are quickly and completely mitigated.
Our complete mitigation includes fully automated killswitches. When a PhishLabs analyst identifies a threat, we have a direct integration into the relevant provider's infrastructure that automatically takes it down, saving security teams valuable time in mitigating costly threats. Our established takedown APIs also position mitigation requests to the front of providers’ internal ticketing or workflow systems.
If infrastructures and platforms (such as social media, mobile apps, and websites) are unable to quickly support direct integration, Fortra’s strategic relationships expedite the requests.
The high-fidelity nature of our curated threat data also makes it valuable for feed and API integration into internal security controls, such as SIEMs, TIPs, SOARs, and firewalls, highly enriching the frontline defense tools used to stop threats from reaching internal users, regardless of the incident’s current mitigation status.
Through strong mitigation actions and relationships coupled with an unlimited takedown model, PhishLabs removes the need for security managers to keep tabs on allotted, bucketized takedowns. Unlimited takedowns ensure proper coverage throughout the year and no need to gain approval from management for additional unplanned expenditures outside of the normal budgeting period. This makes Fortra the preferred cybersecurity ally amongst financial institutions.
Use Cases for Financial Services
Fortra’s anti-fraud services can detect, prevent, and fight back against external fraud from phishing to banking trojans. External fraud prevention is achieved through broad, proactive monitoring (including unauthorized scraping of key content, logos, and other items from website main pages), expert-led threat data curation, and complete mitigation of each legitimate threat. The following protections from Fortra’s solutions protect national banks, credit unions, regional banks, and other financial services.
Customer Phishing Protection
Phishing attacks are quickly detected and shut down, but PhishLabs goes deeper to investigate and dismantle the underlying infrastructure used to carry out attacks, such as phishing kits, drop email accounts, etc. Learn more.
Social Media Fraud Protection
Social media applications expose your financial organization to a broad spectrum of risks including fraud. Threat actors target customers and members through phishing posts and fraudulent impersonations to compromise user login credentials, and to commit deposit fraud. PhishLabs cuts through the noise to detect and mitigate these threats through strong business relationships and the experience needed to quickly stop attacks before damage is done. Learn more.
Vishing, Hybrid Vishing, and Smishing Protection
PhishLabs actively monitors the cybercrime underground to find phishing attacks that use voice (vishing) or SMS text messages (smishing). We then investigate these attacks and shut them down before your trusting patrons receive fake alarming messages. Learn more.
Mobile App Fraud Protection
PhishLabs proactively fights back against unauthorized mobile applications by actively monitoring more than 75 official and unofficial app stores and repositories. Rogue apps are taken down swiftly when they are detected abusing your brand. Learn more.
Brand Abuse Lure Protection
Cybercriminals commonly abuse trusted brands, especially trusted financial brands, in fraudulent emails to trick recipients into infecting themselves with malware. Fortra analyzes massive volumes of spam every day. This allows us to detect fraudulent campaigns abusing our customers’ brands to distribute malware. When detected, we investigate and disrupt the botnets, spamming services, and exploit sites used in the operation. Learn more.
Cybercrime Threat Intelligence
Every day, cybercriminals launch thousands of attacks targeting businesses and their customers. To enable these attacks, they use hacked websites, free domains registrations, free hosting, and several other unscrupulous service providers to host phishing sites, malware, and response-based scams. PhishLabs offers threat intelligence feeds containing malicious URLs, domains, emails, and file hashes that have been detected and verified as malicious, using proprietary automated methods and expert analysis. Targeted enterprises can use these high-fidelity intelligence feeds to block access to attack sites and add context to their security analytics, improving attack detection and preventing compromise. Service providers and hosting companies can use this intelligence to detect malicious content hosted in their networks and data centers. Additionally, security vendors can integrate this data to enhance the protection delivered by their products and services. Learn more.
Banking Trojan Protection
Crimeware, such as banking trojans, are used to hijack customer accounts, harvest user credentials, and steal funds. PhishLabs proactively monitors crimeware operations and detects those targeting our customers. We quickly shut down the sites hosting the crimeware, investigate the full operation, and disrupt the infrastructure they use to plan, stage, launch, and monetize crimeware attacks. Learn more.
Real Results from Real Financial Institutions
With Fortra's PhishLabs, HarborOne Bank was able to improve the efficiency and capabilities of defending against phishing attacks. Through PhishLabs Customer Phishing Protection, HarborOne has eliminated their team’s manual workload and greatly reduce malicious sites targeting the bank.
“During the POC, Fortra identified hundreds of malicious sites and immediately began the process of taking those down. Since that time, we have continued to see a drastic improvement in the number of malicious sites attacking HarborOne which we hope means the threat actors are moving on to easier targets.” - HarborOne Bank
