FEATURE : FINANCE
WITH NEW STARTUPS OFTEN MAKING EXTENSIVE USE OF MODERN CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE AND SAAS PROVIDERS SUCH AS MAMBU , THEY BENEFITTED FROM EFFICIENCY AND SCALABILITY . an attack on the digital systems that facilitate a large majority of payments and transactions would have a huge ripple effect , giving bad actors credibility amongst their peers and providing them great leverage for further extortion .
Confronting an invisible threat
But just as banks once had to deal with ever more sophisticated heist attempts , the tactics of cybercriminals are evolving . Firstly , financial institutions don ’ t just attract standard hackers – their CNI status marks them as likely targets for nation-state cyberattacks , which often have more time , resources , and far more skilled actors with which to find and exploit blind spots . controls , tools and capabilities in place , cloud-based workloads can be easier to penetrate , and are often targeted directly by bad actors .
Earlier this year , the NCSC issued a warning about one such sophisticated tactic : living off the land attacks .
While it may be reasonable to assume that cloud providers provide security by design as part of their platforms , this is sadly not the case . Far too often , organisations leave security gaps that only become clear in post-incident analysis . When said organisations make up part of a nation ’ s critical national infrastructure ( CNI ), remediating cloud security gaps before an attack can occur is essential .
With UK Finance forecasting that notes and coins will account for just 7 % of all UK payments by 2032 ,
52 INTELLIGENTCIO EUROPE www . intelligentcio . com