Over nine in 10 (94%) financial services companies are confident in their cybersecurity posture. However, high confidence is being tempered by an increase in successful cyberattacks against the sector, suggesting that further cybersecurity improvements must be made.
Research from Bridewell has revealed that finance organisations are outperforming their peers across the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) in cybersecurity confidence and maturity. Organisations are taking on average just 13 days to discover a cyberattack, detecting and mitigating security threats much faster than any other CNI sector. In contrast, the transport and aviation industry takes almost two months (51 days) on average to do the same. The finance sector’s high-confidence, high-performance security posture reflects the relative maturity of organisations’ Digital Transformation programmes.
But with cyberattacks rapidly expanding in volume and sophistication, 69% of finance organisations have experienced an increase in threats during the last 12 months. Furthermore, the industry has seen the second-largest rise amongst all UK CNI (81%) in cyberattacks following the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war, suggesting the sector is far from immune to geopolitical cyber-warfare.