2017 ROUND-UP IBS Journal December 2017 23 Tie your mainframe down
The threat landscape for the banks and finance houses presents a baffling array of dangers and an even more baffling array of ‘solutions’ for them. We take a look at where to start and how the mainframe may become next years chief target
Senior Editor Bill Boyle
F Legault, global head of cybersecurity operations at JP Morgan, was very clear about the way the threat landscape has changed recently. At an event in London he said: “In late 2014 we saw the advent of malware targeting wholesale banking platforms. Criminals stopped going after simple, low- value monetary amounts and shifted to high-value payment platforms. The reason they did that was a lot more yield on the crime they committed. We also saw a shift toward business email compromise. We also saw a number of breaches affecting the financial sector that led to fraudulent messages.” Since then cyber crime has reached such a height that the old methods of attempting to protect everything just do not work.
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In the pure fraud arena, the biggest problem for banks is ‘false positives in their anti-money laundering (AML) monitoring systems. This means issues being flagged which aren’t really fraudulent activities – they aren’t even real issues but they take up valuable analyst time. They also mightily annoy genuine customers who get caught in the crossfire and have their accounts frozen, payments halted and mortgage transactions suspended. In the new battleground of customer satisfaction.
Anthony Fenwick, global head of treasury and trade solutions and AML compliance at Citi Group, speaking at the SWIFT Business Forum earlier this year said: “Our biggest problem in this industry is false positives.”When asked by Computerworld if artificial intelligence technology could help solve this issue, Fenwick said: “The story is why are we producing so many false positives, not ‘let’s deploy robots to get rid of the false positives’.
However there may be a solution on the horizon. Having pioneered deception-based cybersecurity, founder and CEO of Illusive Networks Ofer Israeli leads a company at the forefront of cutting edge cyber defense.
I came across Illusive at last month’s Sibos event and was immediately taken with their approach. Israeli says: “We believe in a low and slow approach – the same one your attackers use. They are usually already in your network poking around – the point is to ensnare them. Attackers don’t need to know how your network is physically constructed. They want to know how to move from one system to another, and where to find the coveted crown jewels. Illusive creates a visual map as the attacker would
want to see your network. By weaving deceptions across the IT landscape, Illusive Deceptions Everywhere creates an alternative reality that disrupts the progress of an APT. Attackers can’t tell reality from illusion. Every endpoint becomes a trap.”
The Illusive approach reduces the numbers of false positives to almost zero and traps the attacker in a world of multiple realities to the extent they do not know where they actually are. This approach accepts that the attacker will get inside your perimeter – but once inside they become hopelessly lost. As Israeli says: “Up to 85% of security spend is concentrated on the perimeter in an era where we know there will always be an error which allows them inside your system.”
Ofer Israeli, Founder and CEO, Illusive Networks
Illusive’s systems are currently used by Swift and ten of the world’s biggest financial organisations. Israeli said: “At some point soon – and I predict it will surface early next year – the criminals are going to stop chasing payments – they want access to the real crown jewels currently safeguarded by the mainframe. That will be the real battle and the one banks should start thinking about fixing now.”
The coming year 2018 will see a further rise in ransomware which often offers hackers a simple and lucrative way to make fast money. For the organisations affected, it means not just paying a ransom payment, but also the loss of operations, employee disenchantment and extreme brand damage. According to Trend Micro, Ransomware has grown by over 25% this year alone. Over the coming year, we will see attacks becoming more frequent and spreading into IoT devices, PoS systems, and ATMs.
By encrypting data, hackers are able to demand huge sums of money from organisations such as Uber which recently paid up. It has become a threat that many banks and finance houses have had to suffer in silence; if customers were alerted to the fact that a firm was infected with Ransomware, the damage to the brand is usually irreparable – just look at Equifax or Sony.
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