Q2 Quarterly Threat Landscape Scorecard: Financial Sector

Businesses in the financial sector face a unique set of challenges in the threat landscape. Their access to financial and personal information makes them a prime target for financially motivated bad actors. Mixed with rising geo-political conflicts, it's crucial for those in financial services to be aware of the evolution of tactics being used against their business and customers.

The ZeroFox Intelligence team has created a Quarterly Threat Landscape Scorecard for the financial sector to address these unique challenges and threats. In this post, we'll dive into a few of the key takeaways from this scorecard.

Download the full scorecard

Key Takeaways

In the second quarter of 2022, threat actors continued to exchange ideas on how to maneuver within the economic and political constraints brought on by the conflict in Ukraine. While the ongoing war in Ukraine continued to be the primary driver of geopolitical risk, possible EU and NATO expansion - and new sanctions on Russia - will likely trigger Russia state-leaning groups to target high profile entities.

Additionally, social engineering campaigns remained a persistent threat to financial organizations, including increased use of fraudulent applications, fake Windows 11 upgrades, and employment-related scams to steal credentials and deploy banking trojans.

Vulnerability exploitation also continued to grow, averaging almost 70 CVEs disclosed per day, up from 56 per day at the end of 2021. The pace of vulnerability disclosure likely represents a new normal. The threat from Initial Access Brokers showed signs of resurgence, particularly against financial organizations. Meanwhile, botnet and malware deployment remained high, including infostealers and banking trojans.

Next Steps

Get more key insights and recommendations specific to the financial sector in our Quarterly Threat Landscape Scorecard. Get your copy of the scorecard here.