Nov 3, 2020
Cybersecurity & Your Financial Firm
Is Your Financial Firm Protected Against Cyberattacks?
Cybersecurity has become a critical concern for a wide range of businesses in a wide range of industries. Tens of thousands of cyberattacks happen every single day, costing businesses hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis. Having said that, some lucrative businesses get targeted more, with an excellent example being financial firms.
Why Do You Need to Protect Your Financial Firm Against Cyberattacks?
Financial firms need to be well-protected against cyberattacks for a variety of reasons, including the following:
Disruption of Revenue-Earning Services
Cyberattacks are a huge threat because they disrupt a business’s revenue-earning operations. In one case, the attacker might hold the company’s systems hostage until a ransom is paid. In another case, the attacker might unleash so much malware that the organization’s systems get overwhelmed.
Under ideal circumstances, businesses have practiced how to restore their systems using an up-to-date backup of their most important information, thus enabling them to minimize the disruption. However, if they haven’t, they could lose months and months of work even if they manage to get everything running in a timely manner. Every moment that a business’s revenue-earning operations are disrupted means lost sales as well as lost reputation. As a result, many small and medium-sized businesses affected in this manner collapse soon afterward.
Loss of Trust
Nowadays, people are very concerned about the security of their sensitive information because they have heard numerous horror stories about what can happen when that gets out. Because it’s a huge show of trust for them to entrust their sensitive information to a financial firm, a failure of that trust results in outrage of the same magnitude.
Being breached by a cyberattack can cost financial firms their clients’ business. Furthermore, it can leave a lasting stain on the company’s reputation, thus making it that much more difficult for it to attract new customers in the foreseeable future.
Legal Costs
If people get their sensitive information stolen because a financial firm is breached by a cyberattack, they’re likely to sue. This is particularly true if they suffer damages, which may fan their outrage while building up support for their case. Even if the financial firm manages to win the lawsuit, it is going to wind up with legal costs as well as a huge demand for its time, which affects the running of its revenue-earning operations for the worse.
Even the Best Cybersecurity Can Be Breached
Financial companies should never be complacent about their cybersecurity. After all, most cyberattacks don’t occur because of some kind of super-hacker. Instead, they occur because of human error such as clicking on a suspicious link or choosing a very obvious password.
Financial firms need to put serious effort into their cybersecurity for a couple of reasons. While they can’t eliminate the potential for their systems to get breached altogether, they can do a great deal to reduce the risk of that happening. They can also make preparations designed to minimize any damage done.
Further Considerations
Numerous cybersecurity solutions, such as Sophos Intercept X, can help financial businesses cope with ransomware as well as other cybersecurity threats. Look into them before you need them to make sure that your systems are well-protected.
