Cybersecurity for financial services is a complex, high-stakes challenge. Organizations face a maze of overlapping regulations, relentless threats, and chronic staffing shortages. Despite significant investments and heightened attention, many remain vulnerable to advanced persistent threats, fraud, sophisticated phishing campaigns, and other aggressive tactics targeting PII and sensitive intellectual property.
The Threat Landscape Is Shifting — and Escalating
Threat actors thrive in times of instability. Their increasingly sophisticated tactics — and growing rate of success — often surge during periods of geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, and environmental disruption. The financial services industry, which continues to accelerate its digital transformation, remains a prime target. Rapid digitization, coupled with the ability of threat groups to operate under the radar and avoid prosecution, has allowed malicious activity to evolve with troubling momentum.
In particular, state-sponsored attacks have grown more brazen. Coordinated campaigns by nation-backed groups strain the capacity of governments to detect, deter, and defend against tactics like phishing, supply chain infiltration, and ransomware. Unfortunately, the pace of attacks shows no signs of slowing.
According to FS-ISAC’s Cybersecurity Year in Review 2024, ransomware and third-party service provider compromises remain among the top threats facing financial institutions. The report notes a 28% increase in ransomware-related incidents targeting financial firms compared to the previous year, underscoring the urgency of enhanced cyber resilience.
Now more than ever, financial institutions must prioritize proactive security measures to safeguard their operations, protect customer data, and avoid costly disruptions.
The Rising Risk of Phishing in Financial Services
Phishing attacks targeting financial institutions are growing rapidly in both scale and sophistication. Today’s campaigns are a far cry from the amateurish scams of the past—many now feature professional design and convincing messaging that can easily fool even vigilant employees. These highly targeted attacks often impersonate trusted individuals or entities, exploiting human behavior to bypass technical defenses and gain access to sensitive information.
Beyond data theft, phishing can also act as a gateway to more destructive threats. A single click on a malicious link or attachment can trigger a ransomware infection, locking critical systems and halting operations. In an industry where uptime and access to funds are critical, the consequences can be severe. Strengthening defenses against these evolving threats—especially socially engineered attacks—is essential to safeguarding financial institutions.
Maintaining Compliance with Strict Regulations
GDPR, CCPA, SOX, GLBA, FINRA, PCI DSS — the financial services industry is no stranger to the ever-expanding alphabet soup of regulatory requirements that govern how sensitive data is stored, shared, processed, and destroyed. Every detail has to be accounted for to comply with evolving mandates around data residency, sovereignty, and localization. Compliance remains a significant burden for often understaffed IT and InfoSec teams, who must carefully balance acceptable risk against business convenience.
The challenge is amplified by the widening global talent gap. As of 2025, the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals has climbed to 4.8 million, a 19% increase over the previous year, even as the total cybersecurity workforce remains stagnant. Current analyses indicate the workforce would need to grow by 65% just to meet demand and provide effective protection against the mounting threat landscape. This makes it not just difficult to sustain compliant practices, but also a major effort to monitor and document ongoing adherence as regulations grow more complex.
Staying abreast of frequent regulatory updates poses its own challenge. Notably, PCI DSS 4.0 has now become fully enforceable, with 51 new requirements that took effect as of March 31, 2025. These updates include mandatory multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all access to sensitive cardholder data, expanded inventories of custom software, and new controls against payment page tampering. Organizations storing or processing payment data must ensure technical controls, policies, training, and documentation are fully updated to meet these comprehensive standards.
Financial institutions that can rapidly adapt to these changes, embrace enhanced controls, and invest in recruiting and retaining security talent will be best positioned to operate securely — and in compliance — amid the rigorous regulatory environment.
Cloud Adoption Raises the Stakes for Cybersecurity
As part of ongoing digital transformation efforts, financial services firms have increasingly turned to cloud platforms and managed service providers (MSPs) to boost agility and scale operations. Today, mission-critical data and workloads live in the cloud, powering mobile apps, enabling remote teams, and supporting always-on customer access. In the process, the traditional on-premises security perimeter has all but vanished.
While cloud environments offer speed, scalability, and near-continuous availability, they also introduce new layers of complexity and risk. Security in the cloud is a shared responsibility but many organizations overlook the fine print. To stay secure, teams must clearly understand what their cloud and MSP partners are responsible for and what still falls squarely on their shoulders.
Resilience Must Extend Across the Entire Supply Chain
Many financial services firms lack full visibility into how their third-party partners manage security, an oversight that can carry serious consequences. A single weak link in the supply chain can expose multiple organizations, especially when shared services are involved. To reduce risk and ensure continuity, it’s critical to verify that all vendors and partners follow strong security practices, meet relevant compliance requirements, and are prepared to respond quickly to disruptions.
In a High-stakes Environment, Managing Risk Starts with Visibility
Given the complexity and critical nature of today’s threat landscape, CISOs and their teams are right to ask: “How can we better manage our risk?” Fortra partners with leading financial institutions to evaluate the strength of existing security measures, uncover hidden vulnerabilities, and identify opportunities for improvement.
To build stronger resilience, organizations should focus on three core areas that drive greater visibility, control, and protection.
- Identify and manage the vulnerabilities: Modernizing your approach to vulnerability detection and management hinges on maximizing automation and achieving efficiency in the tools you use. Performing host discovery and vulnerability scans of external (internet facing) and internal IP-based systems and networks is an excellent start. Monitoring security risk scores is another valuable tactic. Learn more about Fortra Vulnerability Management
- Discover and secure valuable data: You know you have sensitive data stored on computers, cloud and on-premises servers, mobile devices, and more. But it must be classified before it can be protected properly. To do this, you’ll have to determine where data is stored, how it’s used, and where it flows. This includes identifying both structured and unstructured data. Learn more about Fortra Data Loss Protection
- Collaborate securely and compliantly Working with internal employees and external stakeholders including customers, partners, and third-party business associates requires strict attention to how data and files are shared. Safeguarding financial file transfers using secure managed file transfer (MFT) gives you full control and audit capabilities over how sensitive PII moves and who can access it. Learn more about Fortra Managed File Transfer
Staying Resilient in an Unpredictable Threat Landscape
Cyberattacks have become strategic weapons, crafted to disrupt operations, shake confidence, and undermine trust. For security teams in financial services, the relentless pressure can lead to fatigue and numbness in the face of constant threats.
At Fortra, we recognize these challenges and are driven to stay ahead of them. Our solutions are designed to outpace global threat actors, protect your most sensitive data, and support the resilience your organization depends on — so you can focus on what truly matters: trust, continuity, and peace of mind.