How banks and financial companies can fight against rising hacking threats

A password cannot guarantee that your information is safe. Hackers around the world use fishing and decoding methods to steal your information while you are sleeping comfortably in your bed. In recent times, we have seen hackers looted a bounty by hacking into individual and company accounts, to steal money from their banks. Now the question arises of how we can save ourselves from these hackers.

What are the most vulnerable things hackers target?

First thing first, you have to understand your information is accessible by anyone on the internet. Some of these hackers use that information to hack into your accounts and after that, it’s just a downhill spiral. Using banking information such as account numbers, passwords, and OTPs on random E-Commerce sites and sharing account details with your friends and family is one easy way hackers hack into your bank account and steal your money.

The basic minimum effort you can do at this point is to make a strong password and use phone encryption on all your banking sites. Stop sharing the credit card and debit card details on unverified sites on the Internet. Now, these are the steps from the user end. Now coming to the topic, How banks and financial companies can fight against rising hacking threats?

There are several ways to protect information from hackers, the first thing to do is find out loopholes in websites and payment gateway systems. What a hacker does is, he/she find loopholes and exploit information to steal money from you. So the first step here is: find the loopholes and fix them as soon as possible. By fixing loopholes, hackers won’t be able to find them and they won’t be able to exploit them for financial gain.

How can companies save themselves from hackers?

Now coming to the second part, now the technology has upgraded the internet into its ultimate form. We can now use our fingerprints and face IDs to log in to our accounts and do our day-to-day Banking. Artificial intelligence or AI services like deep fake and biometric data are easily accessible by these hackers. By using a similar face or a similar fingerprint, these hackers can get into the accounts of the users to gain financial benefits. So how can banks protect themselves from these data exploitation methods? First, financial companies and banks need to upgrade their systems to the latest technologies by implementing artificial intelligence and a different level of encryption and identity verification methods. By doing so, we can minimize the damage or identify a potential hacking attempt.

How to spot a hacking a attempt?

Sometimes it is hard to spot a hacking attempt or differentiate between a hacking attempt and a customer inquiry. We can use modern technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to identify phishing, denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and malware. It can also recognize if the input is from a bot or an actual human being. After that, the second step in minimizing these cyber attacks is the identification by using artificial intelligence and human face recognition system or biometric scanners. These are just the technical aspects of preparing and countering cyber-attacks. Now coming to the most important part of how banks and financial companies can fight against rising hacking threats. Creating awareness.

The top priority while dealing with such cyberattacks is empowering and creating awareness about the cyber attacks. Updating the general public and employees about cyber attacks and giving them proper training to identify and take action is the hour’s need in the modern banking world.

How to protect yourself from hackers?

There are a lot of different and creative ways to spread awareness about the cyberattacks that banks and financial companies can use. Here are the best ten ways to spread awareness about cybercrime and fraud in the finance domain. 

1. Spread awareness using social media. 
2. Use mobile messages to update customers about potential hacking trends.
3. Update the mobile apps and websites and inform customers about every security patch. 
4. Use online advertising channels to spread awareness about the harm of sharing information online. 
5. Use TV/radio or any other form of media to advertise the need for privacy in online banking.
6. Create webinars and press-releases about the latest developments in IT and how it can benefit the finance industry. 
7. Use mobile-centric advertisements as most of the users access the internet on their smartphones. 
8. Use public data and surveys to understand targeted ads; geographically, income-based and age-based ads.

To identity and eradicate such hideous crime is the duty of every employee working in the financial sector.

To sum up everything, we can say cyberattacks harm the economy and its people. Just like the Dutch philosopher Desiderius Erasmus said, “prevention is better than cure” we have to be alert about what’s happening around us and strive for a better society, free from any radical evil that tries to perish our community and economy.