Banking and Finance

  • Eliminates transaction vulnerabilities and risk of stolen or altered data
  • Protects user and company data confidentiality, integrity, and availability
  • Reduces cost and burden of security compliance

The financial services and banking industries are rife with targets for hackers regardless of whether those hackers are individuals, organized crime groups, hactivists, employees of the company, business competitors or even nation-states.  The attractions for these bad actors are significant.  With the possibility to steal credit card information, stop or hinder bank transfers, or even influence political decisions, hackers will persist in their efforts to penetrate financial and banking systems.

Connectivity Presents Convenience, Efficiency, and Competitive Advantage as well as Risk

This industry is very attractive to hackers and vulnerable to attack

More and more of us are doing our banking and shopping online because it simply just so convenient.  Without having to leave the comfort of our home or office we can pay our bills, shop online, check our balances, and transfer money from one account to another.  All these transactions are at risk as we are constantly exchanging both financial and personal information, including our identity and personal interests over the web and through our connected devices and systems.  In reality, the entire connected finance, banking, and business sectors present an attractive target and opportunity for people or groups with bad intentions.  There are security gaps everywhere and even rudimentary credit card sniffers are effective at stealing our information.

It's Happening - Our Banks and the Finance Industry are being Hacked

Systems are constantly under attack and many are successful in stealing information

For all of us, our credit history is critical in our ability to purchase our homes, cars, and other assets.  In May 2017, the Equifax credit reporting agency was hacked.  As a result of this hack, at least 143 million people including Americans, British, and Canadian citizens had their private, sensitive and allegedly secure financial information exposed to hackers.  That hack lasted for about three months and during that time the attackers acquired the baseline information they needed, including social security numbers, birth dates, drivers license info, etc. to set up future fraud and ransomware attacks.  The cost of this hack has been enormous and continues to grow.  Equifax alone reports its costs will surge by $275 million in 2018 to nearly $439 million total to date.

StealthPath: eliminates transaction vulnerabilities and risk

Equifax is not alone.  The financial services and banking industries continue to defend against persistent attacks.  Experian, another credit service provider has also suffered the consequences of a hack.  In January of 2017, Lloyds Banking Group was subjected to a 48-hour denial of service attack, whose goal was clearly to disrupt the operations of the banks participating in the group.  In essence, their system was flooded with fake requests, so many that the system could not respond until the defensive IT team was able to quarantine the offending servers sending the requests. The number and frequency of attacks continue to escalate as the finance and banking systems become more connected and available in order to make our lives as consumers more efficient and convenient.  The security problems in finance, banking, and in business are everywhere in this connected world.  We'll take a look at just a few examples to understand the scope of the problem.

Mergers and Acquisitions - Gaining the Upper Hand

Corporate merger and acquisition information must be protected

Imagine the attraction for competitors or companies participating in a merger or acquisition to know what the other side's position is, to understand their bargaining chips, and their cards before they play their hand.  There is tremendous opportunity for companies to gain the upper hand in negotiations by infiltrating the "other side's" management team's communication channels and data.  It is business critical for all parties involved to protect their communication channels and decision process.  StealthPath ensures trusted data.

Retail Data Security

Security is only as strong as the weakest link in the retail chain

The retail market is at its core a financial transaction business.  With highly distributed consumers, suppliers, on-line retail businesses with store fronts, and even brick and mortar stores with point-of-sale terminals, the retail industry as a whole is exposed in many ways.  Retail data security is an extremely complex and expansive problem and security across the ecosystem is only as strong as its weakest link.  The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PC-DSS) lays the groundwork for data security that all companies need to comply with to protect consumers however there are pervasive gaps and vulnerabilities throughout the infrastructure that need to be addressed.  To solve the known weaknesses there are many different types and combinations of technologies being deployed across the industry such as firewalls, data encryption, and hardware security modules.  The task of keeping all these different systems and devices up to date and with the latest authenticated software and hardware is not only extremely costly but frankly impossible.

Data Compliance - Raising the cost of Security

Cost of security compliance is increasing and StealthPath reduces the cost of compliance

The security risk, financially, is extremely high to both individuals and businesses alike.  As a result, the finance and banking industry sectors are experiencing an explosion in security standards that must be complied with to protect all of the stakeholders involved.  There are standards to protect personal consumer information held by financial institutions such as GLBA, credit union information security programs, and credit card transaction mechanisms to name a few.  PCI-DSS, noted above is just one of these. The Payment Application Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) is another which ensures applications securely store, process, and transmit cardholder data.  Local, federal, and international governments are implementing data security controls so companies will be fined, if they don't protect data.  Regulatory oversight on cyber security is growing and an example of such international control mechanism is the European Union's enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).  Here companies will be fined if data is not protected.  The cost of security is increasing and as more data breaches are realized the costs will only continue to escalate.

Security for the FinTech Industry Is Possible

Even though the "WannaCry" ransomware attack that affected nearly 230,000 computers around the globe gave us another example of how people and organizations with bad intentions can use our connected world to attempt to steal money, the industry has begun to implement new processes and technologies to protect consumer and business data.  Securing the banking, finance, and business sectors is critical and fortunately, there is a better way of ensuring transactions are secure, recorded, and data is protected and any attempts at stealing or negatively affecting transactions is captured and reported.  For those in the finance sector in particular, many are starting to understand the concept of how blockchain technology and cryptocurrency can help secure transaction processing.  By leveraging StealthShield™ and StealthChain™ technologies from StealthPath™ and only StealthPath Trusted™ actors and data, financial transaction and banking systems can be put on the Pathway to Impenetrable Cybersecurity™.

StealthShield and StealthChain:

  • Operate autonomously
  • Require no human intervention
  • Are simple to install
  • Are not detectable by cyber attackers

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