Financial services firms that experience a data breach report an average loss of roughly $4.2 million per attack, according to new research by network services provider Infoblox.

The research surveyed 800 responses from IT professionals working in the financial services industry in North America, Latin America, Europe and the Asia Pacific region.

US organisations were hit hardest by data breaches with $4.7 million in estimated losses on average.

The research also found that over half of all organisations - 54 per cent - surveyed suffered a data breach in the last 12 months with 49 per cent being plagued by a cloud malware attack as well.

The research also covered the costs of network outages, and found institutions lose an estimated $3.2 million from each of these on average.

Asia Pacific institutions were the most heavily impacted by network outages losing $4.3 million on average followed by European institutions who lost $3.1 million.

More than 50 per cent of the survey’s respondents said they expect to face a combination of IoT attacks, cloud vulnerabilities including misconfigurations, and data manipulation attempts over the next 12 months.

Globally, 76 per cent of respondents said network monitoring was the most effective mitigation tactic against these threats, while 64 per cent said threat intelligence and 57 per cent said threat hunting were the most effective tactics.

“The financial services sector has long been a target for bad actors who are following the cyber money trail into the cloud,” said Anthony James, vice president of product marketing at Infoblox. “As the pandemic pushed IT infrastructures to rely on remote work, cloud-based technologies that enabled digital transformation also created soft spots for cyber criminals to exploit."

He added: “This report shows us that cloud compromise has become the biggest cybersecurity issue for financial institutions and the investments they are making to protect themselves.”

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