5 Business Reasons Financial Firms Need a Threat Intelligence Gateway
Financial services firms remain key targets falling victim to cyber security attacks 300 times more frequently than businesses in other industries. Cyber attackers don’t discriminate by size, and 81% of all breaches happen to small and medium-sized businesses.
1. Broader view of threat landscape equals better protection and lower risk.
Cyber defense requires a broad view of threat intelligence more than what a single vendor can provide. Most large security organizations are supplementing foundational controls like new firewalls with threat intelligence from a wide range of sources including commercial, open source, government, and industry.
They are doing this because next generation firewalls (NGFW) and unified threat management (UTM) solutions only provide threat intelligence based on their view of the threat landscape (based on their sensors, customers, etc.). NGFW and UTM providers are not incentivized to provide a broader view of threat intelligence and for performance reasons they don’t allow you to integrate third-party threat intelligence into their solutions.
2. Exponentially increase your cyber intelligence without having to significantly increase the load on your budget or your staff.
The perception of threat intelligence is that it is expensive and requires an army of security analysts, a large SOC, a SIEM, and so on.
While this was the case in the past, the ThreatBlockr TIG eliminates this requirement. ThreatBlockr TIG adds another layer of protection based on tens of millions of threat indicators from multiple sources. It does this in a turnkey, automated, and affordable way allowing you to incorporate threat intelligence without an expensive investment in dollars, resources, or time.
3. Improve your posture with regulatory and compliance frameworks and IT audits.
The use of threat intelligence and information sharing is increasingly becoming a requirement for financial services firms. For example, being able to demonstrate that you are incorporating the Financial Industry’s FS-ISAC threat feed in your security efforts is having positive impacts on FFIEC IT exams. This is also increasingly important as firms look to comply with regulations like NYDFS and frameworks like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.
4. Get more out of your security staff and make their lives easier by reducing their manual workload.
ThreatBlockr TIG dashboards and reporting give you visibility into threats and malicious connections without having to analyze logs. It reduces alert-generating connection events that IT security staff has to deal with whether directly or as a result of tickets from your managed service provider. It reduces time spent on manual log reviews.
A ThreatBlockr TIG customer recently indicated the TIG reduced their manual log review time from four hours to one and half hours. The TIG also can also the need to manage and maintain access control lists, blacklists, and firewall rules.
5. Get more out of your existing security investments.
The ThreatBlockr TIG typically increases the efficiency of next generation firewalls and unified threat management solutions enabling them to focus their more expensive rules-based and deep packet inspection processor cycles on a reduced amount of cleaner traffic. This extends firewall life and can defer upgrades. A ThreatBlockr TIG customer that runs next-generation firewalls was able to reduce his firewall CPU utilization from 70% to 30%.
Want to learn more?
Interested in learning more or trying out a ThreatBlockr TIG? Contact us for questions or a live demo or try out our risk-free, 30 day trial.