Protection for Small and Midsize Financial Institutions

By Federica Della Noce

In an era when growth is critical to survival, small and midsize financial institutions are under pressure to provide greater access to valuable information assets across an expanding universe of customers, content providers, employees, and access devices. While modern IT brings speed and efficiency to these connections and transactions, increased access means increased risk. To prevent intrusions or data theft, companies must safeguard their networks and critical systems from constantly evolving threats.

This article looks at what your institution can do to maintain IT security while minimizing costs.

A changing business environment
In recent years, outsourcing, telecommuting, and flextime have redefined workplace boundaries. The use of external networks has enabled institutions to allow employees, consultants, and contractors to work from anywhere, and the enhanced flexibility has greatly benefited small and midsize businesses. However, an increasingly mobile workforce, wireless communications, mobile systems, and open networks are constantly testing the defensive capabilities of perimeter-focused security measures. Firewalls may provide an adequate line of defense against IT threats for office environments, but they do not offer sufficient protection to outside networks. Institutions that rely on a single critical application need an added layer of defense to ensure their critical systems are protected against both outside and inside attacks.

The new threat environment
The emergence of organized cyber criminal organizations operating across international boundaries has had a dramatic impact on the IT security environment. As criminals converge their attacks across multiple communications channels, exploiting systems and applications in addition to networks, the security burden on small and midsize financial institutions has grown considerably. Yet, smaller institutions can seldom afford in-house security teams dedicated to constantly monitor and track threats, and so remain more vulnerable to security breaches. In fact, many small institutions rely primarily on reactive measures, trusting a combination of vendor updates, software solutions, and just plain luck. Given the high risk, and cost, of IT failures, smaller institutions must look for more reliable measures to enhance their network security.

Defending the new perimeter
The first step in enabling a comprehensive threat management solution is to acquire adequate protection for network perimeters. Firewalls check incoming IP packets and block those believed to be intrusive, but they cannot provide complete protection against blended threats. Third-generation unified threat management appliances tightly integrate multiple defenses, such as a full-inspection firewall, antivirus, spyware, adware protection, content filtering, and intrusion detection and prevention, giving small and midsize businesses protection capabilities well beyond generic firewalls. The integration of multiple defenses ensures a level of network security that cannot be achieved with separate "point" solutions. With a comprehensive threat management solution, firewalls and antivirus applications work together to isolate infected files outside the network, while intrusion detection and prevention applications deploy countermeasures to denial-of-service, peer-to-peer, and instant messaging threats. In addition, content filtering adds another layer of protection by enabling institutions to control network access according to user role while offering protection from risky Web and non-business related content.

Securing networks
While defending the perimeter is an important component of comprehensive threat management, not all threats come through gateways. All too often attacks originate internally in the form of unauthorized access and peer-to-peer and opt-in intrusions. In addition, employees, customers, and others who use mobile systems to access a company's network may unwittingly import bugs or other malicious code they picked up while using their machines in an unprotected environment -- such as a wireless network at a coffee shop or an airport.

In the absence of an in-house IT security team, smaller companies can protect their networks with appliances that are able to automatically stop attacks at all layers of the computing stack without human intervention. Securing remote and mobile systems is a top priority for small and midsize financial firms that need to open their networks to outsiders. To this end, a compliance on contact approach ensures than network access is granted only to remote and mobile clients that meet the institution's specific security policies.

To operate safely, these systems need their own configured protection such as enhanced defenses against spyware and adware, personal firewalls, antivirus, intrusion prevention, and security clearance prior to accessing a company's network.

Protecting critical systems
Unfortunately, even the best safety perimeters are not foolproof. To minimize damage to the servers that host a company's most important assets and databases, critical systems must be hardened. Since the majority of attacks directed toward critical hosts target system files and registries, security policies that restrict the behavior of operating systems, applications, and programs are necessary to safeguard critical servers.

Conclusion
Threats targeting business networks are becoming more complex and spreading faster than ever. As small and midsize financial institutions grow, they require flexible and scalable security solutions that can proactively shield their networks from multilevel attacks.

Federica Della Noce has over 10 years experience writing and editing content for a variety of Web sites.