Five steps to your money, and the control that breaks each one
An attack on a bank is a sequence, not an event. Break any link and the rest of the chain is worth nothing, which is why the cheapest defence is rarely the last one.
Reconnaissance
Staff, suppliers and exposed services mapped. Credentials from earlier breaches bought on criminal forums, where trade in access to financial organisations has grown roughly fivefold.
Threat intelligence and dark web monitoring name the actor and surface your own leaked credentials before they are used.
Perimeter breach
Phishing against named employees, exploitation of an unpatched internet-facing service, or simply logging in with a credential that was never rotated.
Email security ahead of the mailbox, measured awareness training, and a vulnerability cycle that closes exposure before it is found for you.
Foothold and persistence
Remote access trojans and commodity malware deployed to hold position, frequently the tooling of choice in attacks on financial organisations.
Endpoint detection with retained telemetry and automated containment, so a single host is isolated instead of becoming a beachhead.
Lateral movement
Movement towards core banking, the card environment or the ATM segment, using legitimate credentials wherever possible.
Network detection across internal traffic, privileged access brokered through one recorded gateway, and segmentation that means a stolen account reaches one system.
Monetisation
Fraudulent transfers, card data theft, cash dispensing, or extortion against disclosure of customer records.
Database security and data leakage prevention around the records themselves, plus device-level assurance on ATMs and payment terminals.
The metrics a banking board should be asking about
Not tool counts. These four, tracked monthly, are what tell you whether the spend is working.
Where most banks start
Managed SOC
Round-the-clock monitoring and triage, either fully managed or co-managed with your team.
Penetration testing
Annual testing that the regulator expects, run against the systems that actually matter.
Incident response retainer
Agreed response times and a team that already knows your environment before the call.