Los Altos, CA — Jan. 30, 2024 — Contrast Security (Contrast) today released its Modern Bank Heists report, an annual report that exposes the cybersecurity threats facing the financial sector.
Authored by Contrast’s Senior Vice President of Cyber Strategy Tom Kellermann, the report is a warning to global financial institutions (FIs) that security must be top-of-mind amid evolving cybercrime cartels — cartels that are employing new attack vectors and launching systemic attacks against critical infrastructures within the sector.
In a series of interviews, financial sector CISOs, SVPs of Cybersecurity and Managing Directors of Information Security from around the world revealed specific trends when it comes to notable cyberattacks, e-fraud and cyber defense. Some of the most eye-opening results from the report include:
- 74% detected campaigns to steal nonpublic market information.
- 77% experienced attacks against their application programming interfaces (APIs).
- 58% experienced counter-incident response, with adversaries disabling cybersecurity agents, manipulating logs or timestamps, or launching distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to slow the victim’s response.
- 58% saw an increase in application attacks, with attacks such as Class Loader manipulation, Expression Language Injection and untrusted deserialization becoming more common and new threats to supply chains targeting software development, integration and delivery infrastructure.
- 48% were victimized by destructive attacks launched punitively to destroy data.
- 45% believe they were victimized in stealthy attacks they weren’t able to detect.
“The magnitude and the complexity of cybercrime attacks continue to grow each year. The ingenuity and imaginations of the criminals are impressive, as the world of cybercrime continues to evolve from past pig butchering, ransomware and business email compromise (BEC) attacks to sextortion and cryptocurrency scams,” said Derek Booth, Assistant to the Special-Agent-in-Charge, U.S. Secret Service and Head of the Mountain West Cyber Fraud Task Force.
“As the criminals’ attacks evolve, the rest of the world must evolve as well, or we will become the next victim,” said Booth.
“Cybercrime cartels have revolutionized their cybercrime conspiracies in the financial sector as they now steal nonpublic market information for the purposes of digital front-running. These same cartels have become punitive against the security team as they leverage destructive attacks so as to hinder the response of the security team. This phenomenon should serve as a harbinger of things to come,” said Kellermann.
The report provides helpful guidance and specific defensive countermeasures to defend against growing cybercrime conspiracies and cyberespionage.
Booth will be joining Kellermann for a webinar at 1 p.m. EST / 10:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday, Feb. 6 to discuss their reactions to the report and the financial security risks impacting organizations this year.
To download the Modern Bank Heists report, please visit https://www.contrastsecurity.com/cyber-bank-heists-report.
To attend the webinar with Derek Booth and Tom Kellerman, please visit https://www.contrastsecurity.com/webinar-bank-heists-2024
Contrast’s financial capabilities by visiting https://www.contrastsecurity.com/solutions/financial-services.
