Cyber security spending highest for financial institutions

Banks and other financial institutions spend three times the amount non-financial organizations are spending on cyber security, a new report by Kaspersky Lab has shown.

According to the Financial Institutions Security Risks research from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, cyber security is a high priority for financial institutions, as they're coming under increased pressure from the government, top management and customers.

It was said that almost two thirds (64 percent) of all financial institutions will improve their IT security, regardless of the return on investment.

Banks are mostly getting ready for the full takeover of mobile. More than four in ten (42 percent) of banks predict the overwhelming majority of their customers will be using mobile banking in three years.

At the same time, an average firm is handling almost ten thousand devices.

Phishing seems to be the biggest security threat, with almost half (46 percent) of banks saying their customers are being attacked on an everyday basis, and 70 percent of banks reported financial fraud incidents that led to loss of money.

"Combatting the constantly changing threats targeting their own IT infrastructure and customer accounts is an everyday challenge for financial institutions," comments Veniamin Levtsov, vice president, Enterprise Business at Kaspersky Lab.

"To put an effective response in place -- that protects all points of vulnerability -- requires the financial services industry to have several key components: build a highly integrated anti-targeted attacks protection, embrace multi-channel anti-fraud security and get actionable intelligence on evolving threats."

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