IT Security Compliance Of Credit Unions

Today’s reality is that credit unions are an attractive target for cyber attackers. While breaches at these organizations don’t always make national news, the attacks are growing in frequency for several reasons:

Less Mature security and Compliance programs: Credit Unions struggle to match advanced security technologies, mature security best practices and large IT team of larger enterprises, often leaving more entry points exposed. Most credit unions are required to comply with FFIEC mandates that focus on protecting member data and financial systems from security breaches.

Complex Environments: Credit Unions no longer have a simple on-premises network, and increasingly use mobile, cloud-based, or hybrid IT infrastructure. An increasing number of applications introduce weak links and vulnerabilities exposing credit unions to loss of member data, financial fraud, and business disruptions.

Easy Entry: Cybercriminals often view mid-sized organizations as a prime entry point into a larger target, as we’ve seen with many highly-publicized data breaches at large organizations.

Challenges: As a credit union, the organization has unique needs to protect member data and other digital business assets. Data breaches cost money, business disruption, and member loss. Credit unions need to guard against determined adversaries. Additionally, Credit unions are required to meet and implement security controls as defined in the FFIEC handbook. These controls include continuous monitoring of audit logs to detect, identify and respond to suspicious and anomalous activity, checking for and fixing vulnerabilities, and patching systems and applications to protect member data. Credit unions need to have a well-defined process and implement necessary technologies to achieve FFIEC compliance.

Due to limited IT budgets, it is common for a credit union to have a small IT team tasked with all aspects of IT operations. As a result, lean IT teams are challenged to protect their critical IT assets from cyber-attacks and comply with FFIEC requirements. There are service providers that provides an affordable suite of subscription-based services to help credit unions to meet security and compliance challenges. They have a team of GSOC security analysts, working as an extension of the IT team, provide 24x7x365 monitoring of the IT environment to detect, analyze and respond to suspicious activity from cyber-attacks. They conduct periodic vulnerability scans and provide guidance on fixing vulnerabilities and patches based on business risk to continually reduce the attack surface, all the while providing an auditable record to help you meet FFIEC audit requirements.