Financial institutions are top spenders for cybersecurity, and with good reason: As data breaches become more sophisticated and commonplace, the industry's vulnerabilities are becoming apparent.
One of those worries is the risk of losing something that's vital to the industry's livelihood—clients' trust. Financial firms are concerned that they'll witness a data loss so severe it will result in a major loss of consumer confidence, reported
MarketWatch.
“Until very recently, people would say, ‘It’s as secure as a bank,” said Todd Morris, founder and CEO of New York-based BrickHouse Security, whose clients include about half of the Fortune 500 companies.
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“Peoples’ level of trust in banks has definitely gone down, so the banks really cannot afford to have what happened to Target happen to them,” he told MarketWatch.
Toll beyond measure
Furthermore, data breaches at a financial institution can make those firms susceptible to unknown but potentially massive consequences.
When hackers initiate attacks, such as the one recently reported by JP Morgan Chase, they could use the stolen information to take out loans in customers’ names, commit various kinds of identity theft, or worse, manipulate financial data inside the banks’ computers, Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at Trend Micro, a computer security firm, told
Huffington Post.
Manipulation
The financial industry also fears hackers may not only manipulate consumer data but may also target company data, such as their stock prices, says MarketWatch.
If hackers manufactured an individual company's share price, would anyone know?
Probably not, according to Morris. “Somebody could already be doing it and it would be easy for someone to manipulate the stock market and it would blend in the background noise,” he told MarketWatch.
As Kellermann explained, there's a difference between stealing data and manipulating data. “If you alter data, you are changing the value of money. It could undermine the integrity of the institution,” he said.
Systematic attack
Moreover, one of the industry's top cyberfears is that hackers' mischief will extend beyond an individual company or group of customers and we'll witness a systematic attack that disrupts exchanges or markets as a whole, says MarketWatch.
“Anything that would affect the trust and confidence of the markets is really the top priority,” said Karl Schimmeck, vice president of financial services operations at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.
When NASDAQ was hacked four years ago, the attack was thwarted, but officials found that other exchanges and banks were vulnerable to a similar attack. They were spared only because the hackers hadn’t bothered to try—yet, MarketWatch added.
That even financial institutions can fall victim to hackers should definitely raise eyebrows because they spend the most money and have the most sophisticated defenses, Jacob Olcott, a cybersecurity expert at Good Harbor Security Risk Management, told Huffington Post.
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