Banks Tackle Cybercrime Through Information Sharing

According to PWC’s 2012 Global State of Information Security Survey, only 80% of financial services survey respondents are sure that their organizations are prepared to address the threats that confront their critical information. This is a 12% increase since 2006, and more than just a bit disturbing.

Additionally, in 2011, an increasing number of respondents noted that they had experienced negative events. Even with improved security best practices and technology, financial organizations are still falling behind.

As it’s been historically the case, financial institutions continue to be among the top targets for cybercriminals. In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Gartner analyst Avivah Litan noted that she expects fraud detection spending and customer authentication systems to increase by as much as 12% to $1 billion across financial companies in the next two years. This will be a record.

That said, financial organizations are beginning to work together to share intelligence surrounding cybercrime in order to better identify potential attacks and negative events. Banks have often shied away from sharing internal data so as not to provide anyone with a competitive advantage – but not sharing has begun to give criminals that advantage instead. Keith Gordon, Bank of America senior vice president of security said it well, “We realized that just as the fraudsters collaborate with each other, we as an industry must collaborate.”

We expect see more banks sharing critical data to help prevent the proliferation of online fraud. Private discussions around security strategy will also likely be a part of this information exchange, which has been a rarity in times past. The common goal of preventing against cybercrime is quickly uniting the financial services industry, and we hope to see additional steps made in this direction.

As this collaboration begins to take effect in the market, Silver Tail Systems certainly expects to play a large role. We work with some of the biggest banks in the industry, and with our ability to gather web session intelligence in real-time at the Navigation Layer of the web, we can help financial institutions instantly detect and nullify malicious behavior on an even larger scale. Our ability to help share this information across our customer base would enable our banking customers to better thwart potential attacks – and this would be a true industry breakthrough.