Jai Vijayan
Dark Reading
Banks and other financial firms have disclosed three times as many breaches so far this year than they did in 2016, Bitglass says.

Between January and August this year, financial firms disclosed three times as many breaches as they did in the same period in 2016—103 in 2018 compared to 37 two years ago.
The top three breaches alone this year compromised more records than the 64,512 records exposed in all of 2016, Bitglass said.
Hacking and malware were once again the primary causes like they were in 2016, and accounted for 74% of the data breaches that financial companies have disclosed so far this year.
Nearly 15% of the breaches resulted from accidental data disclosures.
Among the financial institutes that have disclosed breaches this year is RBC Royal Bank, Goldman Sachs, Fidelity Investments, Sallie Mae, and Dun & Bradstreet.
The biggest incident involved an employee at SunTrust Banks who stole the names, addresses, phone numbers, and account balances of some 1.5 million of the banks’ customers.
In another instance, attackers managed to gain access to the Royal Bank of Canada’s travel rewards website and steal payment card data belonging to some 66,000 individuals.
Banks and other financial firms have significantly better defenses against malicious activities, but precisely for that reason they also tend to be targets of much more sophisticated threats.
Deloitte’s study showed that the amount of money an organization spends on cybersecurity doesn’t automatically translate to better security.
Deloitte found that many financial companies with below average security spending had a better risk posture than companies that spent a lot more.
Factors that did affect security were top-level accountability, a culture that emphasized shared responsibility for security, and a risk-focused approach to mitigating security threats.
At the same time, Deloitte also found that larger financial companies are not allocating enough resources to cybersecurity, with budgets ranging between 5% and 20% of the total IT budget, and the average hovering around 12%.
Link: https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/financial-sector-data-breaches-soar-despite-heavy-security-spending/d/d-id/1332958