Financial Services Threat Trends
Reputational trust is the foundation of every financial institution—and it’s fragile. Just one cyberattack can undo years of brand equity. Threats like phishing sites, look-alike domains, social media impersonations, and fake mobile apps lead to theft, fraud, and operational disruption.
According to Fortra research, the financial sector is the #1 target for phishing and social media threats, as well as a key source of stolen credentials traded on the dark web. These risks are intensified by persistent internal challenges: regulatory pressure, poor data governance, and lack of transactional transparency.
Fortra Brand Protection helps financial institutions stay ahead of evolving cyber threats, protecting digital channels and restoring trust before damage is done.
Financial Institutions Trust Fortra
Proactively Disrupt Fraud: Detect and Prevent
The list of cybersecurity threats aimed at financial institutions is daunting due in part to the treasure trove the financial industry remains for threat actors. But what are these threats and how do they directly impact financial institutions?
Brand and executive impersonations are on the rise, often with high-stakes consequences. Fraudsters routinely mimic trusted financial brands or executives to deceive audiences, solicit fake investments, or undermine institutional credibility.
Compounding the threat, stolen credentials and account data, often sourced from the dark web, are openly marketed and sold on popular social media platforms, turning everyday channels into hubs for criminal activity.
The threats plaguing financial institutions:
Phishing Sites
A hoax website built to mimic a financial institution’s brand with the intention of misleading users to give up personal data such as usernames, passwords and financial information. See how Fortra Brand Protection Customer Phishing Protection proactively detects phishing sites.
Fake Mobile Apps
Impersonation of a banking app to fool customers and steal data, such as login information, deliver malware, and carry out other malicious objectives. Protect your customers and brand with our Mobile App Protection.
Social Media
Threat actors frequently impersonate social media accounts to mislead customers, spread false financial advice, or carry out malicious schemes. These fake accounts often use stolen profile photos and usernames designed to closely mimic legitimate profiles. Learn about our Social Media Protection.
Look-alike Domains
Look-alike domains are crafted to deceive, often differing from legitimate domains by just a character, like a “0” instead of an “o.” These spoofed domains trick users into trusting fraudulent sites, leading to compromised credentials, financial loss, and reputational damage.
Fortra Brand Protection provides comprehensive protection against look-alike domain threats, so attackers don’t get a foothold. Learn more about Domain Monitoring.
Compromised Credentials on the Dark Web
Credentials (employee and customers) obtained by someone other than the owner. These compromised credentials could be usernames, passwords, and any other authentic credentials exposed from a cybersecurity breach and sold on the dark web for nefarious purposes. Learn more about Compromised Credentials Monitoring.
Account Takeover
Unauthorized access to an online account usually obtained through compromised credentials. Take down phishing threats with Customer Phishing Protection.
Expanded Visibility into Compromised Credentials
Stolen data is a powerful weapon for threat actors, fueling attacks that result in data breaches, account takeovers, and reputational damage.
Financial data dominates dark web marketplaces, with stolen credit card details, BIN numbers, and combo lists (combinations of login credentials, passwords, emails, and bank account or credit card numbers) among the most commonly traded assets.
While it may not be possible to keep data off the dark web, having the power to monitor credentials on the dark web is critical to prevent attacks.
Easier said than done, especially for security teams juggling limited visibility, restricted access, and knowledge gaps. Meanwhile, threat actors don’t wait. They continue to adapt and advance, regardless of an organization’s cybersecurity challenges.
Fortra’s Compromised Credentials Monitoring delivers broad visibility into stolen employee and customer credentials revealed from dark web sites and harvested from third-party leaks, infostealers, botnets, and other forms of malware. This allows your financial organization to quickly respond and implement countermeasures, such as forced password resets and lockouts to guard against potential account takeovers, breaches, and malware attacks.
Learn more about Compromised Credentials Monitoring
Threat Mitigation Techniques
Fortra Brand Protection delivers the most comprehensive and effective mitigation in the industry with unlimited takedowns. By combining takedown, browser-blocking, and integration with internal security controls, we ensure threats are quickly and completely mitigated.
Our complete mitigation includes fully automated killswitches. When one of our analysts identifies a threat, we have a direct integration into the relevant provider's infrastructure that automatically takes it down, saving security teams valuable time in mitigating costly threats. Our established takedown APIs also position mitigation requests to the front of providers’ internal ticketing or workflow systems.
If infrastructures and platforms (such as social media, mobile apps, and websites) are unable to quickly support direct integration, Fortra’s strategic relationships expedite the requests.
The high-fidelity nature of our curated threat data also makes it valuable for feed and API integration into internal security controls, such as SIEMs, TIPs, SOARs, and firewalls, highly enriching the frontline defense tools used to stop threats from reaching internal users, regardless of the incident’s current mitigation status.
Through strong mitigation actions and relationships coupled with an unlimited takedown model, Fortra Brand Protection removes the need for security managers to keep tabs on allotted, bucketized takedowns. Unlimited takedowns ensure proper coverage throughout the year and no need to gain approval from management for additional unplanned expenditures outside of the normal budgeting period. Fortra Brand Protection breaks the attack chain for financial institutions.
Use Cases for Financial Services
Fortra’s anti-fraud services can detect, prevent, and fight back against external fraud from phishing to banking trojans. External fraud prevention is achieved through broad, proactive monitoring (including unauthorized scraping of key content, logos, and other items from website main pages), expert-led threat data curation, and complete mitigation of each legitimate threat. The following protections from Fortra’s solutions protect national banks, credit unions, regional banks, and other financial services.
Customer Phishing Protection
Phishing sites may be taken down quickly, but we go further, uncovering and dismantling the infrastructure behind the attack. This includes phishing kits, drop email accounts, and other tools threat actors rely on to launch and repeat campaigns. Learn more about Customer Phishing Protection.
Social Media Fraud Protection
Social media applications expose your financial organization to a broad spectrum of risks including fraud. Threat actors target customers and members through phishing posts and fraudulent impersonations to compromise user login credentials, and to commit deposit fraud. Fortra Brand Protection cuts through the noise to detect and mitigate these threats through strong business relationships and the experience needed to quickly stop attacks before damage is done. Learn more about Social Media Fraud Protection.
Vishing, Hybrid Vishing, and Smishing Protection
Fortra Brand Protection actively monitors the cybercrime underground to find phishing attacks that use voice (vishing) or SMS text messages (smishing). We then investigate these attacks and shut them down before your trusting patrons receive fake alarming messages. Learn more.
Mobile App Fraud Protection
Fortra Brand Protection takes a proactive stance against rogue mobile apps, monitoring over 75 official and unofficial app stores and repositories. When unauthorized apps misuse your brand, they're swiftly detected and taken down to minimize risk and protect customer trust. Learn more about Mobile App Protection.
Brand Abuse Lure Protection
Cybercriminals commonly abuse trusted brands, including financial brands, in fraudulent emails to trick users into infecting themselves with malware. Fortra analyzes massive volumes of spam every day. This allows us to detect fraudulent campaigns abusing our customers’ brands to distribute malware. When detected, we investigate and disrupt the botnets, spamming services, and exploit sites used in the operation. Learn more.
Cybercrime Threat Intelligence
Every day, cybercriminals launch thousands of attacks targeting businesses and their customers, leveraging hacked websites, free domain registrations, free hosting, and other shady services to host phishing sites, malware, and scams.
Fortra Brand Protection delivers high-fidelity threat intelligence feeds that contain verified malicious URLs, domains, emails, and file hashes, powered by proprietary automation and expert analysis.
Enterprises use these feeds to block attack sites and enrich security analytics, boosting detection and preventing compromise. Service providers and hosting companies identify and remove malicious content within their networks. Security vendors integrate this intelligence to strengthen their protection offerings. Learn more.
Banking Trojan Protection
Crimeware, such as banking trojans, are used to hijack customer accounts, harvest user credentials, and steal funds.
Fortra Brand Protection proactively monitors crimeware operations and detects those targeting our customers. We quickly shut down the sites hosting the crimeware, investigate the full operation, and disrupt the infrastructure they use to plan, stage, launch, and monetize crimeware attacks. Learn more.
Real Results from Real Financial Institutions
With Fortra Brand Protection, HarborOne Bank improved the efficiency and capabilities of defending against phishing attacks. Through our Customer Phishing Protection, HarborOne eliminated their team’s manual workload and greatly reduce malicious sites targeting the bank.
“During the POC, Fortra identified hundreds of malicious sites and immediately began the process of taking those down. Since that time, we have continued to see a drastic improvement in the number of malicious sites attacking HarborOne which we hope means the threat actors are moving on to easier targets.” - HarborOne Bank
