Banks Secretly and Silently Struggling with Ransomware

“You’re almost certainly not going to hear about successful ransomware attacks on banks,” says Fraud Prevention Expert, Ross Hogan in an interview with Banking Exchange. “It is probably one of the most catastrophic events that a bank could suffer.”

Why?

If a financial institution made a public announcement that the firm was infected with ransomware, the brand damage would be irreparable.

Moreover, it could potentially create panic amongst customers, ensuing a bank run. Customers might decide to withdraw cash from a financial institution, destabilizing a bank to where it runs out of cash and unexpectedly face bankruptcy. The result of this scenario would be – from an economic standpoint – catastrophic.

And NO ONE wants this to happen.

But we know financial institutions are a target

How? Ransomware does not discriminate.

All it takes is one phishing click or a wrong installation and your computer or your entire network could take a hit.

“They’re not just trying to infect your workstation and lock your files on you workstation; they’re trying to go for any network drive they can find,” says Editor-in-Chief of Cyberheist Stu Sjouwerman. “That’s where the risk is. This is what happened at Presbyterian Hospital in Hollywood.”

Not only has ransomware infected hospitals, but schools, police departments, and city departments – all institutions that we rely on.

The financial industry took note. Last year, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council issued a ransomware warning about the frequency and severity of the threat.

What banks can do

Be proactive and learn how you can protect your organization from the inside out:

• Take security expert, Troy Hunt’s free ransomware course
• Read our complete ransomware guide
• Check if your locked files have a decryption tool with the ransomware identifier

How Varonis helps financial services stop and prevent ransomware

We’ve been working with organizations from all verticals to prevent ransomware. And here are a few quotes from a few financial institutions that describe their experience with how Varonis helps them stop and prevent ransomware:

• “Even though we have a state of the art firewall and new antivirus software, neither was able to detect or stop Crypto. Varonis DatAlert not only sent us email alerts when a user got hit by Crypto, but also logged that user out before the virus could do any damage to network shares. That alone justified its cost.” – Southern California Wealth Management Firm

• “Our endpoint protection had detected the virus on a computer and had appropriately removed the code, but not before it had kicked off the encryption process. The point to note here is that although the endpoint had isolated the problem it wasn’t able to kill the process. Varonis was able to identify the process and then remediate the issue and we can prevent it from happening again.” – A Northwestern Bank

• “ Of all the expensive security products we’ve purchased, DatAlert is the only solution that has done, and is doing, all of the alerting and notification of anomalous behavior, especially ransomware. ” – A Major Bank in Western Canada