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Study: Financial services firms fail to act aggressively against cyberthreats

Cyberattacks against financial services providers are on the rise, but many firms' response is disproportionately weak in comparison with the threat level.

September 15, 2014

According to a Kaspersky Lab and B2B International survey of worldwide IT professionals, 93 percent of financial services organizations experienced various cyberthreats in the past 12 months.

Worse, nearly one in three still does not provide protection of users’ endpoints or implement specialized protection within their own infrastructure.

According to the survey, this lack of action is causing many businesses to lose faith in financial firms tasked with keeping their information safe. In fact, only 53 percent of businesses felt that financial organizations did enough to protect their information.

For their part, only 28 percent of financial services organizations think the risk of damages from cybercrime is outweighed by the cost of prevention. This, despite the fact that 52 percent of financial institutions have a policy of reimbursing all losses from cybercrime without investigation — to the tune of $66,000 to $938,000, depending on the size of the organization.

Further, 47 percent of these companies think that a loss of credibility or damage to reputation as a result of a data breach is the worst consequence to the company.

Ross Hogan, global head of the fraud prevention division at Kaspersky Lab, commented on the survey results:

[I]t is concerning that many firms have not taken the necessary steps to implement proper security. We are seeing more and more cyberattacks targeting financial organizations and while many will take action to reimburse the financial losses as a result of cybercrime, the damage done to a financial organization’s reputation isn’t as easy to repair. Based on these survey results, we expect to see more financial services organizations take the necessary steps to not only protect customer data and financial information, but to take the steps needed to ensure their important reputation remains intact.