Financial institutions are one of the main targets of cybercriminals nowadays. Banks hold substantial financial assets and manage very sensitive personal data — and they may reasonably be expected to take security most seriously.
Unfortunately, numerous banks underestimate the threat and possible aftermath. Here are just a few examples of what the damages might be:
- 2012: Operation High Roller, a series of sophisticated cyber heists targeting financial institutions across Europe, the United States, and Latin America, resulting in an estimated theft of $78 million.
- 2016: Bangladesh Bank heist via the SWIFT network, $81 million stolen in a single attack.
- 2014: A cybercriminal group used Carbanak malware to infiltrate over 100 banks globally, leading to cumulative losses exceeding $900 million.
Besides financial damages (in direct theft, ransomware payments, and recovery costs) a successful cyberattack promises a bank a huge reputational crisis, legal issues, and regulatory claims, fines and additional audits. Finally, disrupting a bank can also erode public trust in the financial system, which some actors exploit for broader chaos.
- 2024: Labelled as the worst cyberattack in Iranian history, IRLeaks group attack affected 20 out of 29 Iranian credit institutions, compelling the government to pay millions in ransom to the attackers. It had to be done in order to avoid public panic, bank runs and a possible collapse of Iran’s instable financial system.
Main Cybersecurity Challenges that Banks Face
Banks share the majority of risks and vulnerabilities with other industries with high financial stakes, sensitive data access and a notable role of human factor. But certain menaces stand out:Â Â
- Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs): Criminals may use advanced techniques (phishing, ransomware, zero-day exploits, social engineering) to bypass defenses. They’re not just script kiddies; some are state-backed with big resources.
- Insider Threats and Customer Behavior: Employees or contractors with malicious intent or compromised credentials can exploit internal systems. Clients using weak passwords or falling for scams (like fake bank emails) create vulnerabilities banks can’t fully control.
- Legacy Systems: Many banks run on creaky infrastructure up to mainframes from the ’80s. These systems weren’t built for today’s internet-first world, making them vulnerable to modern attacks.
- Third-Party Vulnerabilities: Banks often rely on external vendors, which can introduce security weaknesses. Think of the 2013 Target breach via an HVAC contractor or the Evolve Bank & Trust incident in 2024, where a data breach affected multiple fintech clients.
How Threat Intelligence Can Help
Financial institutions process millions of transactions daily. Detecting a malicious needle in that haystack in real time is a monumental task. Proactive cyber threat intelligence (CTI) gives banks a heads-up on what’s coming so they can dodge the punch. Here’s what it helps to do:
1. Monitor and analyze threat landscapes to identify emerging threats like new malware strains or phishing campaigns targeting banks. Stopping attacks before they hit is incomparably more preferrable than reaction and mitigation, however professional, to an attack that has hit.
2. Quickly detect and remediate the incidents that still happened, minimizing potential damage.
3. Get data enriched with context: why a specific group might target a bank, what tactics they use, and what they’re after. This lets prioritize defenses against the most likely threats. By correlating raw data (say, IP addresses tied to attacks) with broader trends, CTI helps security teams sift through noise, reduce false positives, and focus on genuine threats.
4. Uncover attacker infrastructure — like command-and-control servers or malicious domains — allowing banks to block them proactively or share intel with law enforcement.
5. Develop robust security strategies, efficient policies and employee training programs.
Using Threat Intelligence Lookup to Enforce Bank Cyber Resilience
Threat Intelligence Lookup is a must-have tool in the arsenal of a security operations team. It is a sophisticated threat search engine that provides contextual data on indicators of compromise, of attack, and of threat behavior; lets explore the tactics and techniques employed by cyber criminals.
Over 40 search parameters, the support of wildcards, Yara and Suricata rules, the integration with an interactive sandbox make it a help in nearly any SOC task.
Here is an example. Suppose that a bank’s security analysts are aware of the Lumma malware — an info-stealer often used against financial institutions. Let’s see how TI Lookup can turn that knowledge into actionable defense.
submissionCountry:”US” and threatName:”lumma” and domainName:””
Lumma infrastructure revealed: domains spotted in recent attacks
This search request provides a list of potentially malicious domains associated with Lumma attacks. The request includes the name of a threat, Lumma, and the indication that we are looking for domains. It also includes a country name — US — because we want to sort out the samples of Lumma added by our users from the USA. If we are an American bank, we want to know whether the specified malware targets our region.
| Conduct your own search: 50 requests available for TI Lookup trial Contact ANY.RUN to negotiate your plan |
Filter the found domains to get a list of the ones marked as malicious and preemptively block those domains at your firewalls or DNS level, stopping phishing attempts before they reach customers or employees. Feed them to your monitoring and detection solutions to receive alarms when they appear in the traffic.
Warn your customers and employees of danger. Keep an eye on the activity dynamics of adversaries that leverage Lumma malware: if you see that attacks are spiking in your region, double down on defenses.
Conclusion
Banks absolutely need proactive cyber threat intelligence because they’re sitting ducks without it. They’re targets, they lose big money, and while outright bankruptcy is rare, the damage can push smaller players under or force mergers.
CTI gives them foresight, focus, and a chance to stay one step ahead of hackers. Our example of using ANY.RUN’s TI Lookup shows how granular intel can translate into real-world action, shrinking the attack surface bit by bit.
