Banks face imminent threats as digital business grows

According to data, 60 percent of a bank’s public facing digital assets is outside the company firewall. The largest banks own an average of 7,500 public facing digital assets and the risk of fraud increases as their digital footprint grows. Furthermore, the report mentions that banks rely on external third-party code to power tracking, analytics, serving company ads and supporting re-targeting. This third party code provides an additional attack vector that can be exploited by malicious players.

The same source indicates that a bank has, in average, 1,777 mobile applications. Of these, only 5 percent can be found in the official app stores (Googleplay, Apple, etc), whilst 95 percent are hosted on secondary, tertiary, affiliate or foreign app stores.

Elias Manousos, CEO of RiskIQ, has declared that the two trends of externally hosted digital assets and the use of third-party components highlights the changing security landscape that banks and other organisations are dealing with. As digital assets move outside of the corporate firewall, traditional security approaches become ineffective and the potential attack surface for the adversary grows.