THE local financial sector must integrate security and improve their threat intelligence capabilities now that local digital money transactions have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Kaspersky.
According to the cybersecurity company, easy money is the prime motivator for the large majority of cybercriminals.
“The financial sector is uniquely positioned to be a target of attacks regardless of season because it’s always where the money is,” said Kaspersky general manager for Southeast Asia Yeo Siang Tiong.
“The growth of digital financial services in Malaysia, like in other parts of the region, is creating new and heightened risks for both service users and service providers. In this case, technology will be the game-changer.”
Based on the MasterCard Impact Study 2020, Malaysia led Southeast Asia in e-wallet use at 40% uptick compared with the Philippines (36%), Thailand (27%) and Singapore (26%).
Malaysia’s Ministry of Finance, under the recently launched MyDIGITAL, also aims to ensure that payments for all government services will be made on a cashless basis by 2022.
Yeo further acknowledged that with continuing lockdowns, increase in remote working arrangements and the full-throttle push towards digital transactions, not all banks are prepared to handle cyber threats.
Although the speed of digital technology implementation is taken seriously by financial institutions, securing the platform and the users hold as much value as innovation.
Moreover, with almost half of organisations having difficulties finding the difference between real threats and false positives, security teams are left ‘flying blind’ instead of properly prioritising actionable threats, thus opening an organisation to unexpected attacks.
To secure ongoing efforts for digital connectivity, identification, and payments infrastructure, up-to-the-minute threat intelligence feeds play a vital role in keeping tabs on the cyberattacks that grow in both frequency and complexity.
“Threat intelligence can identify and analyse cyber threats targeting a business. It’s about going through piles of data to examine it, to spot real problems and deploy solutions specific to the discovered problem,” Yeo explained.
For the financial services industry, threat intelligence is useful to prevent data loss and provide direction on safety measures.
It also serves as a wealth of information for cybersecurity experts and the rest of the IT community to create a collective knowledge base to cybercrimes. – Aug 13, 2021
