How threat hunting can transform cybersecurity for credit unions

Credit unions continue to be prime targets for cybercriminals due to the confidential data possessed and financial assets. The latest generation of cybercriminals is fueled by large ransomware payments, state-sponsored adversaries who provide assets, expertise that amplifies cyber risk, and a bullish dark web market. Credit unions must evolve their security strategy to a proactive approach, including hunting suspicious activity and threats before reaching them.

Threat hunting gathers multi-source, raw, curated data about existing threat actors and their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). This helps analysts understand the tactics used by adversaries and identify signals or signs of their unauthorized presence in their target environment. It allows organizations to stay multiple steps ahead of cybercriminals by identifying likely future targets by understanding their motivation and tools that could be applied from one target to another.

Three Advantages of Threat Hunting for Credit Unions

• Protect Your Customers and Credit Union

Threat hunting is essential in protecting your credit union from cyber threats and exposing potential compromises of your network and assets. Successful hunting and threat identification fuels new remediation recommendations and automatic detections and strengthens your security posture. It goes beyond simply delivering automated alerts that need customer-side confirmation to Indicators of Compromise (IoC).

Credit unions can benefit from threat hunting by discovering attacker presence and targeting, which has already made it past an organization’s first-line defenses. Detecting previously unseen and new attacks requires knowledge and expertise of attacker motives and capabilities.

• Attract New Customers and Enhance Digital Opportunities

As credit unions move to cloud-based services, the threat surface expands. Cloud-based services shift some security burdens to the cloud provider and streamline operations. With terabytes of data in the cloud, you still have a responsibility to establish contractual security requirements, identify vulnerabilities, and validate the security posture of the vendors.

Efficient threat hunting and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) operations provide the air cover that allows you to adopt emerging technology and new services to grow your business. Successful MDR operations cover the core network and ingest telemetry and intelligence from cloud services. It’s an integrated approach that facilitates growth rather than stifling innovation.

• Mitigate Financial Risk

Mitigating the risk of an expensive threat can only be done by staying a few steps ahead of cybercriminals. Threat hunting is essential as criminals level up their ability to infiltrate and exploit credit unions. It takes a proactive approach, saving your credit union time and money in the long run.

Take the Proactive Threat Hunting Approach

In today’s world, adding threat intelligence to your cybersecurity strategy is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity. It is vital to seek threat hunters that use dynamic methods to uncover security incidents that would otherwise go unfound. Taking charge of your IT environment is more than a suggestion; it’s a critical move that, if not made timely, will result in tremendous damages to pay.

A practical solution that many credit unions use is investing in a Managed Detection and Response platform and services that work as an extension of their security team. The truth is that ‘when, not if’ there will be a cyberattack, your credit union should make the cybersecurity investment to protect your IT landscape before bad actors strike.