Kaspersky advises finance sector to improve threat intelligence to mitigate

The COVID-19 pandemic saw an increase in digital money transactions, which has become another vulnerability that cybercriminals are ready to exploit. Cybersecurity company Kaspersky advises the financial sector to integrate security and improve threat intelligence capabilities to mitigate any attacks.

“For the large majority of cybercriminals, easy money is the prime motivator,” said Yeo Siang Tiong, GM for Southeast Asia, Kaspersky. “And the financial sector is uniquely positioned to be a target of attacks regardless of season because it’s always where the money is. The growth of digital financial services in the Philippines, like in other parts of the region, is creating new and heightened risks for both service users and service providers. In this case, technology will be the game-changer,”

Referencing the Philippine Banking Sector Outlook Survey, Kaspersky said there is a need for the finance sector to integrate and leverage technology in the next two years, even if the Philippines received a perfect score in the Global Microscope 2020 with regulations set on e-money and basic deposit accounts.

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“Digital transformation always presents new challenges, especially for the financial sector,” Yeo said. “The Philippines is in the middle of a digital revolution where the use of online payment gateways and e-wallets is expected to expand. While it is a huge responsibility for banks and financial service providers to secure their virtual systems, investing in the most intelligent solutions is essential as they build their cyber defenses to better protect their customers and their businesses. From a cybersecurity standpoint, threat intelligence is an advanced, specialized framework that the financial sector will significantly benefit from.”

Threat intelligence

In Kaspersky’s recent IT Security Economics Report, it was found that threat intelligence is considered an area of investment for 41% of enterprises and 39% of small businesses in response to a data breach.

To secure ongoing efforts for digital connectivity, identification, and payments infrastructure, up-to-the-minute threat intelligence feeds play a vital role in keeping tabs on the cyberattacks that grow in both frequency and complexity.

Threat intelligence can identify and analyze cyber threats targeting a business. It’s about going through piles of data to examine it, to spot real problems, and deploy solutions specific to the discovered problem.

But threat intelligence is not to be confused with threat data which is a list of possible threats. Threat intelligence is when IT specialists or sophisticated tools “read” threats and analyze them, and apply historical knowledge to know if a threat is real and if it is, what to do about it.

With Kaspersky’s Threat Intelligence Services, organizations are supplied with data feeds that cover phishing links and websites, and malicious objects that target Android and iOS platforms.

Warning on cyberattacks

Since users most of the time access digital financial services through smartphones, banks can easily warn clients against ongoing cyberattack campaigns that usually involve phishing links on emails posing as the bank.

This up-to-the-minute machine-readable threat intelligence in security information and event management systems also enables security teams to quickly launch an automated incident response and easily sift through which alerts must be escalated for further investigation and resolution.

This feed is a collection of data sourced from Kaspersky’s own cloud infrastructure called Kaspersky Security Network, web crawlers, an always-on unique proprietary platform called Botnet Monitoring, email honeypots, research teams, and the company’s global partners.

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