Colombian banks spend more than 300,000 million Colombian pesos on cybersecurity.
Cyber-attacks are one of the many common enemies that all financial institutions in the world have. Cybersecurity, therefore, is the maximum protection shield to repel computer criminals.
According to the United Nations Organization -UN-, every 39 seconds there is a computer attack, a situation that has increased since 2020, when virtual transactions began to increase, because of the confinement due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
Financial institutions, one of the preferred targets for cybercriminals, have begun to look more closely at the different virtual security solutions.
The Financial Superintendence of Colombia has published the Information Security and Cybersecurity indicators of the Colombian-banking sector, which report the investment in the security of Colombian banks in 2021, the number of attacks suffered, as well as the resolution of vulnerabilities and the cost of the attacks.
The report highlights that, during 2021, the Colombian banking system as a whole invested close to 341,000 million Colombian pesos (approximately 90 million dollars) in cybersecurity. We are talking about a considerable figure to improve the security of the networks.
More on the Report
Perhaps the most interesting fact is that during all of 2021, the banking sector in Colombia received 1,362 million attacks. This implies considerable pressure on the Colombian banking system. It is worth noting that 21 important incidents were generated, which did not imply an interruption of the services or affectation to the assets of the users. The incidents, from their beginning to their correction, had an average duration of 6.85 days.
The sector has carried out different ethical hacking tests to find vulnerabilities and corrected 99.05% of them within the same quarter when first detected.
An interesting fact is the cost to the banks of all these attacks. According to the report, there is a cost of 75,000 million Colombian pesos in 2021 (about 19 million dollars) for unauthorized operations. This means that the users were fraudulently impersonated or any other incident that led to the generation of a transaction not authorized by the user.
What Financial Institutions Can Do
Banks and other institutions that are part of the financial system find cybercrime one of their greatest current challenges.
Although in general terms financial institutions are doing their job well and investing more and more in cybersecurity, the key is not to relax and always have the support of cutting-edge technology supplied by expert security manufacturers.
One of the options offered by the market is authentication and risk management solutions, where financial entities have access to reliable identity platforms, which are capable of detecting threats such as Trojan viruses, malware, phishing attempts, and any suspicious behavior and thus block and track attacks immediately.
In addition to this, other state-of-the-art cybersecurity solutions allow identity verification. This helps to improve overall security and user experience while complying with current legal guidelines and regulations, an issue that is strictly compliance.
It is advisable to opt for solutions from manufacturers with experience and recognition in the market that offer proven effectiveness above 93% in document analysis, in addition, that their implementation is simple and highly reliable, and lastly that they are easily adaptable to the needs of any entity regardless of its size. Solutions with these specific advantages and characteristics have managed to attract the attention of a large part of the world system.
The concept of cybersecurity has changed. Currently, its implementation plays a leading role in the decisions of any global financial institution, so being alert and working to always be ahead of cybercriminals is a general obligation and a differential value that users have learned to increasingly appreciate.
By Audy Castaneda
