Financial institutions’ IT security expenditure is three times higher than non-financial organisations, as the increased take-up of mobile banking makes cyber attacks more commonplace, according to research from Kaspersky Lab.

The research also found that customers are increasingly playing an important role in highlighting security incidents, with a quarter (24 per cent) of financial institutions saying that some of the threats they faced in 2016 were identified and reported to them by a customer.

Suffering from attacks both on their own infrastructure and on their customers, retail banks spend three times as much on IT security as comparably sized non-financial institutions.

Moreover, 64 per cent of banks admit that they will invest in improving their IT security regardless of the return-on-investment, in order to meet the growing demands of government regulators, top management and even their customers.

A total of 42 per cent of banks predict that an overwhelming majority of their customers will use mobile banking within three years, but admit that users are too careless in their online behaviour. The majority of the banks surveyed (46 per cent) admitted that their customers are frequently under attack from phishing attempts, with 70 per cent of banks also reporting financial fraud incidents as a result, leading to monetary loss.

Veniamin Levtsov, vice president of enterprise business at Kaspersky Lab, said: “Combatting the constantly changing threats targeting their own IT infrastructure and customer accounts is an everyday challenge for financial institutions. To put an effective response in place - that protects all points of vulnerability - requires the financial services industry to have several key components: build a highly integrated anti-targeted attacks protection, embrace multi-channel anti-fraud security and get actionable intelligence on evolving threats.”

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