TECHNOLOGY
Assessing the current cybersecurity landscape: Cyber-attacks targeting banks In our current digital age, banks are able to offer a variety of benefits and plenty of app-based services to customers. That said, new technology innovations are actually augmenting the surface area for risks of new kinds of cyber-attacks to take place and therefore limiting the effectiveness of potential countermeasures and security solutions. Therefore, there is an imperative need (now more than ever) to stay ahead of the game by pre-empting new forms of attack so that evolving technologies can be put in place before any changing risks can occur. Especially with the intricacy of the ATM ecosystem, with its heterogeneous hardware and software that are both expensive and difficult to update. As ATMs and customer touchpoints need to be available 24/7, financial organisations typically do not have the latest security policies in place, nor a centralised view of their attack surface. It is critical that banks strike the balance between software deployment and hardware maintenance, whilst simultaneously keeping control of changes in software and hardware and ensuring it is as secure as possible. Taking a deep-dive into the current cybersecurity landscape in the financial services sector, ATMs and central servers that control ATMs have become a popular target for cyber-attacks. The pressing issue is growing worldwide, given that 58.16% of respondents revealed to the ATMIA Global Fraud and Security Survey 2019 that over the latest year ATM attacks for both physical security breaches and fraud incidents increased (compared to 53.85% in 2017). These types of ATM fraud attacks can be distinguished as follows: - Data fraud – derived from data breaches, such as account numbers, pin codes, and other personal data - Physical fraud – consists of theft of valuable assets, such as debit or credit cards 27
