Why is MDR important for credit unions?
Introduction
As a credit union, you are responsible for safeguarding your members' finances. Managed Detection and Response (MDR) can help protect your credit union from losses or damage due to fraudulent activity by flagging potential threats and alerting security personnel to their activities.
What is managed detection and response (MDR)?
Managed detection and response (MDR) is a security service that helps organizations identify, investigate, and respond to sophisticated cyber threats. Security vendors providing true MDR services include 24/7 monitoring, threat hunting, and incident response.
MDR proactively monitors suspicious activity and responds accordingly. Typically provided by third-party vendors who specialize in data security, these vendors work with you to develop customized detection and response plans that fit your credit union size and budget.
MDR companies maintain detailed logs of possible threats to a credit union's network. These logs are used to predict and identify future attacks. Reporting is another key feature of MDR.
What cyber security threats do credit unions face?
Credit unions face many of the same cyber security threats as other organizations, including phishing attacks, malware, and ransomware. However, credit unions may also be targeted by criminals looking to exploit their members' financial information. MDR can help protect your credit union from these threats.
Cybercriminals typically attack credit union members in one of two ways: through social engineering attacks or by exploiting vulnerabilities in the credit union's systems. Exploiting vulnerabilities in a credit union's systems can allow cybercriminals to gain access to member information without the members' knowledge or consent.
Social engineering attacks include phishing, which involves sending emails or other messages that appear to be from a legitimate source but which contain a solicitation for personal information. These messages can trick users into revealing sensitive information, such as their name, account number, and password.
Other forms of social engineering attacks might convince a user to visit a malicious website, run an unauthorized program, or perform some other tasks which directly aid the criminal.
Cybercriminals exploit common vulnerabilities, including missing patches, poor password management, poor staff security training, and Zero-Day software flaws. The latest in hacking technology, AI-enabled bots, allowed hackers to crack 11.7 million passwords belonging to LinkedIn accounts.
For those hackers that are really on the ball, Zero-Day vulnerabilities exploit a security flaw that is unknown to the developer or vendor of the software. Attackers can exploit this type of vulnerability to gain access to sensitive information or systems. Because these vulnerabilities are not known, they can be challenging to defend against. Zero-day vulnerabilities are often found in operating system updates and new releases of popular software applications.
How does MDR help with these threats?
By using MDR, credit unions improve their ability to detect malicious actions on the network resulting from these and other security threats.
If an employee is socially engineered into opening malware in an email attachment, MDR is designed to catch that activity; if an email server is compromised with a zero-day exploit and used to attack other systems on the network, MDR sees such an attack and can quarantine the asset to protect the rest of your network. In either case, MDR is meant to quickly detect these threats and ensure that they are acted on with expediency.
How does MDR work?
The first step in managed detection and response is to identify the threat. A Security Operations Center (SOC) monitors suspicious activity 24/7/365. An agent on every endpoint feeds data to the SOC, which is analyzed for suspicious activity.
Once the threat has been identified, the next step in MDR is to respond. The MDR provider works closely with the credit union to formulate a detailed plan for countering specific types of threats. A SOC employs dedicated cybersecurity engineers to assess threats and perform immediate mitigation responses, as well as to contact you and any other pertinent personnel for follow-up/remediation. The response and remediation will vary depending on the severity of the threat and the resources available.
Conclusion
MDR is important for credit unions because it improves their ability to detect and respond to threats when they occur because no preventative system is perfect: people are fallible despite security training, and there is no way to patch a zero-day exploit. By working closely with an MDR provider, credit unions can develop a detailed plan for countering threats and ensuring their institution and members' security.