Email Protection for Financial Services

Email security, data protection, and compliance solutions specifically designed for Financial Services

Last year saw a dramatic increase in cyberattacks against the financial services sector, as cybercriminals capitalized on the volatility of the Coronavirus pandemic. In fact, according to recent research, 80% of financial institutions reported an increase in cyberattacks in 2020. These figures are expected to increase as we move towards post-pandemic life. Attackers will continue to employ new, sophisticated methods by which they can steal corporate data. This means that, whether you’re a fund management service, an insurance company, a banking service, or a payment and settlement service, cybersecurity should be one of your chief concerns.

In the financial services sector, email correspondence may contain sensitive personal or legal information, and it’s often critical that this information be actioned within a strict deadline. For your brand to succeed, your clients must be able to trust you with the integrity of their confidential data—this means that you must secure your emails.

The critical takeaways for financial services companies:

1. 86% of all breaches are financially motivated, and the financial industry is the second most common victim of security breaches.

2. Implementing an encryption solution can help you meet many major data privacy standards, including PCI DSS (requirements 4.1 and 4.2) and GLBA, and prove your ability to keep customer data secure.

3. A strong email encryption solution can secure sensitive data such as PII and NPI against unauthorized access via sophisticated email threats like social engineering, BEC, and ransomware, as well as island hopping attacks.

Key Challenges Facing Financial Services Companies

Cybercriminals are attracted to the financial services sector like bears to honey, and once they get their paws in the hive, the destruction can be devastating. Financial companies must be on guard on three fronts.

1. Data Security

As a financial services organization, you’re responsible for keeping your customers’ confidential data secure at rest, in storage, and in transit. This means protecting it against potential cyberthreats. Money is the primary focus of the vast majority of system hacks, so it comes as little shock that the financial industry is the second most common victim of security breaches, closely following the healthcare industry. Personally identifiable information (PII), nonpublic personal information (NPI), and financial information (such as credit card numbers and account numbers) are lucrative targets for attackers, who either sell this data illegally on the dark web or hold it ransom until their victim pays a fee for its return.

Two of the most common attacks currently facing financial service organizations are spear phishing and ransomware. Spear phishing is a form of social engineering attack in which attackers disguise themselves as a trusted source, such as a colleague. The phishing emails attempt to trick their victims into handing over sensitive information, such as account credentials, or to click on a URL or attachment that will download malware onto the victim’s device.
Last year, 75% of organizations around the world experienced a spear phishing attack, and 74% of attacks on U.S. companies were successful.

Ransomware is a cyberattack that involves malware. Once downloaded to the target’s device, often via a phishing email, the malware locks files or encrypts them, effectively holding them hostage until the target organization pays a ransom to restore the data. The United States saw the number of ransomware incidents double last year, making it the most targeted country in the world.

One of the most common ways for attackers to infiltrate financial organizations is via island hopping attacks. An island hopper compromises supply chains and partners in order to access their primary target. AOne out of every three financial organizations experienced island hopping last year. Financial organizations are particularly susceptible to this kind of attack because of their interconnectivity with third-party services. This makes it ever more important that your data remains secure—even if one of your partners is compromised.

To mitigate these threats, you must protect sensitive information against unauthorized viewing, as well as implement data loss prevention (DLP) processes so that you can serve your customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, even in the event that one of your partners is breached.

2. Reputation Protection

Your customers trust you to keep their data safe. In fact, a recent survey found that 96% of American bank account holders describe security and fraud protection as being one of the most important features they look for in a bank.

Reputational damage is one of the key consequences of a data breach. If you fall victim to a cyberattack, you’ll likely lose the trust of your customers. A strong encryption solution will help stop you from falling victim to an attack, thus preserving your reputation in the eyes of your customers.

Financial organizations often send emails containing PII, NPI, and other sensitive information such as account numbers, credit card information, insurance information, and credit scores. When sending these types of information, you need to be certain that the right person receives them. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) can be one weapon in your security arsenal. MFA requires recipients to verify their identity in two or more ways before they’re granted access to the email’s content.

3. Compliance

As a financial services organization, you’re aware of regulatory standards with which you must comply in order to operate within the law. These regulations differ from country to country and from state to state, so it’s important that you research which compliance standards are relevant to you. Data privacy standards typically affecting financial institutions include (but are not limited to) the following:

• PCI DSS states that unencrypted credit card information should not be transmitted over open networks such as the internet and wireless networks (Requirement 4.1), and that organizations should never send unencrypted primary account numbers via end-user messaging technologies (Requirement 4.2). This means that your organization can send payment card information via email and still achieve compliance, as long as you encrypt that information.
• GLBA requires U.S. organizations to establish appropriate standards for protecting customers’ NPI. That includes any sensitive data given to your organization in order to receive a financial product or service (e.g. name, address, and social security number), as well as transactional data (e.g. payment history) and data you obtain as a result of serving them (e.g. consumer reports).
• The FFIEC provides guidance for organizations that want to be GLBA compliant. They state that “financial institutions should employ encryption to mitigate the risk of disclosure or alteration of sensitive information in storage and transit.” This includes making sure your chosen encryption solution protects your data for as long as it needs protecting, i.e. that your subscription won’t run out or expire. You must also manage your cryptographic keys properly. To ensure you’re meeting these requirements, your chosen solution should be in line with the NIST and FIPS encryption standards.

When it comes to encryption, meeting compliance requirements ensures that you’re able to prove your ability to keep customer data secure. This is useful both in terms of insurance and in the event of litigation. The loss of encrypted data is generally exempt from notification requirements, and it isn’t usually considered to be a “breach” because the lost data is unreadable. This means that, even if you suffer a breach that results in the loss of encrypted data, you can still meet GLBA requirements.

How Trustifi Protects Financial Services in Three Steps

Trustifi is a comprehensive email encryption provider that enables organizations to secure their communications with AES 256-bit end-to-end encryption. Trustifi mitigates data loss and secures outbound emails. In addition, Trustifi’s cloud-based solution features inbound threat detection and prevention tools to actively protect your users’ inboxes against spam, phishing, and ransomware attacks.

Our solution ensures your financial data is secure at rest, in storage, and in transit, while protecting your company’s inboxes against targeted cyberattacks. Here’s how:

With Trustifi, emails are encrypted using AES 256-bit encryption and stored in Trustifi’s secure private cloud, ensuring the highest levels of security of encrypted data at rest, in storage, and in transit. Additionally, decryption keys are stored on each user’s device, which means that not even Trustifi can access encrypted emails.

Trustifi’s solution is designed for ease of use. Senders can encrypt emails from within their email client with the click of a button, as well as track the delivery status of their emails, recall emails, and edit emails that have already been sent, including attachments. This gives each sender complete control over securing their communications without sacrificing time or having to follow complex processes.

Everyone makes mistakes—a fact that Trustifi takes into account. The solution features a “one click” data loss prevention (DLP) and compliance policy. System administrators can quickly and easily choose the regulatory standards with which their organization needs to comply and set the Trustifi service to function according to those standards. With 1-Click Compliance™ enabled, administrators allow Trustifi’s AI Engine to scan outbound emails for sensitive content and PII, such as credit card numbers. If it detects such content, the solution automatically implements the appropriate actions to secure it, reducing the risk of human error organization-wide.

This feature enables organizations to become fully compliant with PII, HIPAA/HITECH, GDPR, FSA, FINRA, LGPD ,and CCPA standards. With a click of a button, Trustifi eliminates the complexity of compliance while ensuring that confidential data remains secure. Administrators can configure this policy from within the solution’s management console.

Trustifi also provides advanced protection against inbound email threats, such as social engineering and ransomware attempts. It can filter out spam emails, which can clog up and slow down your users’ mailboxes. Trustifi’s AI Engine scans all inbound email communications in real time and rates each message according to its threat type and severity—these ratings range from “Authenticated” to such alerts as “Impersonation Attack” and “Spoofing Attack.”

Administrators can configure threat detection policies to automatically quarantine malicious emails so they never reach their intended victims. Quarantined emails can be viewed and released from within the platform’s management console, and they’re held for 60 days before being permanently deleted.

Additionally, administrators can configure “allow” and “deny” lists to automatically block emails from known malicious senders and to ensure that emails from safe external senders aren’t mistakenly quarantined because they weren’t recognized by the AI engine. These email protection features are easy to deploy and integrate with common cloud-based email clients via Trustifi’s API.

Key Features of Our Financial Solutions

Why Choose Trustifi?

Protect Against Data Breaches

Trustifi offers protection against the most prevalent and dangerous email threats currently targeting financial services companies, including social engineering, ransomware, and account compromise. These attacks can be devastating not only for your organization’s infrastructure, reputation, and finances, but also for the personal safety of your employees.

Trustifi’s AI Engine scans all inbound emails for anomalous or malicious content, such as phishing links and malware attachments, and removes threats before they reach their target. With Trustifi, you can create blacklists of known threat actors to prevent repeat attacks. You can also create whitelists of trusted senders to reduce false positives and ensure your staff can access critical information when they need it.

Stay Compliant

Most regulatory standards require you to prove your compliance—it isn’t enough just to encrypt your emails, you also need to provide data that shows how you’re using the solution to increase your security. Trustifi’s encryption solution will help you provide this proof by generating reports of the delivery of encrypted emails, including who sent and received them, when, and from where. These logs enable you to demonstrate compliance, including how you’ve configured your solution to meet regulatory standards (such as by using NIST- or FIPS-approved encryption).

Trustifi’s 1-Click Compliance™ feature allows you to secure your data according to all applicable standards, including PCI, GLBA, and FFIEC, with just the click of a button. Simply choose the standard with which you need to comply, and sit back as Trustifi’s AI Engine automatically encrypts any emails containing sensitive information—even if a staff member forgets to encrypt it themselves.

Maintain Control

Using Trustifi, your staff can send securely encrypted emails with the click of a button. Just as easily, recipients can open them—even if they themselves don’t have Trustifi. For an additional layer of security between potential attackers and your sensitive data, you can request that recipients verify their identities via MFA. They simply enter their custom password or scan a fingerprint, and they can access the message.

As well as being user-friendly for end users, Trustifi is easy for administrators to set up and manage. Quickly configure 1-Click Compliance™ and DLP policies to automatically encrypt all sensitive email content so that you don’t have to worry about your users remembering to do it. Allow our AI Engine to scan your inbound emails for malicious content and automatically remediate any threats.