What Banks Can Learn From Recent Data Breaches

By Dimitri Vlachos, Vice President of Marketing, ObserveIT

It’s good to learn from your own mistakes, but it’s better to learn from someone else’s. In the case of banks — and those in charge of their IT security — it’s much better to learn from the mistakes of JPMorgan and other recent high-profile victims, as opposed to making similar mistakes yourself.

Indeed, the JPMorgan attack in particular has resulted in big changes for financial institutions, with IT security departments scrambling to make the necessary adjustments in order to secure highly sensitive information. In fact, JPMorgan itself plans to devote an additional $250 million per year along with 1,000 new employees to enhance their cyber security objectives.

But as we’re starting to see, simply throwing money and manpower at the problem is not the only solution, nor is it the most effective one. As user-based attacks increase in frequency (and severity) there are other key steps that organizations should take to ensure a higher degree of IT security.

Know Your Risky Users

While most companies continue to worry about damage inflicted by an anonymous hacker, the fact is that the real culprit resides much closer to home. According to recent studies, 69 percent of reported security incidents involve trusted insiders (e.g., employees, contractors and third-party vendors) — 84 percent of which have no administrative rights.

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