Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 18 | Page 85

KS SPEND ON IT SECURITY IS 3X HIGHER THAN NON- NANCIAL ORGANIZATIONS Financial institutions are under pressure to ramp up security, with trends such as the increased take-up of mobile banking putting banks’ IT infrastructure defenses at growing risk of cyber-attack. Increasingly, customers are playing an important role in highlighting security incidents, with a quarter (24%) of financial institutions saying that some of the threats they faced in 2016 were identified and reported to them by a customer. A ccording to the Financial Institutions Security Risks research from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, security investment is a high priority for banks and financial institutions. Suffering from attacks both on their own infrastructure and on their customers, retail banks spend three times as much on IT security as comparable sized non-financial institutions. Moreover, 64% of banks admit that they will invest in improving their IT security regardless of the return-on-investment, to meet the growing demands of government regulators, top management and even their customers. Despite banks putting serious efforts and budgets into safeguarding their perimeters against known and unknown cyberthreats, protecting the breadth of IT infrastructure that now exists from traditional to specialized, ATMs and Point-of-Sale terminals has proved difficult. The vast and ever-changing threat landscape, coupled with the challenge of improving the security habits of customers, has provided fraudsters with ever more points of vulnerability to exploit. www.intelligentcio.com INTELLIGENTCIO 85 85