The Need for Attack Surface Management in Financial Services

Financial institutions have grown increasingly more dependent on the internet. Its ubiquity has allowed it to play a key role in online banking, support business-to-business relationships with partners, serve as a conduit to public cloud-based resources and SaaS applications, and to replace traditional wide area network technologies as a higher bandwidth, lower cost alternative for branch and/or remote offices. However, the ready availability of the internet has also resulted in digital asset sprawl across a financial institution - sometimes without the involvement of IT or even Information Security teams. The ability to maintain an accurate, centralized inventory of internet-accessible resources for the company is severely challenged. Lacking this visibility into the actual internet attack surface, the security posture cannot be properly established and puts the financial institution at significant risk. The financial services industry needs attack surface management to fill this void.