Credit unions today are well aware of the threats posed by malicious actors—insiders and outsiders—looking to gain access to their confidential data.

Yet, despite heavy investments in staff and security technologies, the bad guys are winning the battle.

Here’s why:

• Hackers are getting smarter, moving beyond ransomware and malware. Fileless attacks—requiring no payload – are becoming more common, and often prove more effective than traditional malware-based threats.

• Hackers are infiltrating financial networks to steal employees’ identities, and are using those identities to roam your network—without you knowing about their presence.

• Protecting your data/IP is getting harder, especially when the bad guys are disguised as legitimate users.

• Legacy tools can’t properly manage today’s dynamic infrastructure, often creating dirty networks and entry points for intruders.

Budget is not the problem. The real issue is identifying practical ways to thwart attacks.

Understand vulnerabilities in your network

With constant changes in your infrastructure, establishing and maintaining assets can be a challenge.

Unfortunately, omissions of basic security measures often are the root cause of today’s breaches. Some of the most common incidents creating vulnerabilities are:

• Stale accounts and accounts with expired passwords.
• Accounts with passwords that don’t expire.
• Privileged accounts with delegation rights.
• Accounts with weak encryption.
• Misconfigured share drives.
• Misconfigured and misprivileged systems.
• Accounts that violate HIPAA, PCI DSS standards, or NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

Sanitize your identity ecosystem

Having a healthy identity ecosystem is the first step to thwarting attacks. But it takes time and diligence.

It requires having a thorough understanding of the complexity of the constantly changing IT environment, and the ability to know what sensitive data is being accessed by every account on the network.

To ensure optimal protection and improve the health of your identity ecosystem, you must be able to:

• Provide 100% visibility of every account—24/7 in real-time.
• Detect anomalous behavior and be alerted when suspicious activities occur.
• Detect the theft of user passwords.
• Assess risks objectively to reduce false positives and save admins from drowning in data and wasting time chasing down non-events.
• Detect lateral movement.
• Remediate identity vulnerabilities.

Even with committed resources, it is hard to detect malicious behavior. Proactive companies that understand the impact of data exfiltration and the sophistication of today’s threat actors are looking at new threat-hunting tools that actively seek out intruders using the latest threat intelligence, analytics, and cloud-based resources.

Automatically reduce attack surface

Technology is revolutionizing the way credit unions secure enterprise assets and ensure security compliance requirements are met. Next-generation Security Event and Information Managers (SIEMs) are cloud-delivered SaaS solutions that protect against internal and external malicious actors.

A perfect SIEM uses artificial intelligence, machine learning, and pattern recognition to monitor an organization’s network 24/7 to detect changes in user behaviors. It also provides real-time visibility and analysis of the activities of every identity within the enterprise.

In addition to detecting intruders, a next-generation SIEM helps your organization improve the health of your identity ecosystem by identifying stale accounts, accounts with reversible encryption, accounts with passwords that do not expire, misconfigured privileged accounts, IT operation failures, and NIST Cyber Framework violations—automatically enhancing the health of your identity eco-system and reducing your attack surface.

Without requiring any internal resources—staff or dedicated hardware—Adlumin Security Platform protects against even the most sophisticated hackers.

The Adlumin Platform is revolutionizing the way credit unions secure sensitive data and intellectual property while achieving their compliance objectives.

Adlumin is a perfect cloud-delivered SIEM replacement or augmentation technology for any organization. Adlumin is the answer: It’s cost-efficient and cloud-based with no appliances or servers on-remise, and it deploys in 20 minutes.

ROBERT JOHNSTON is CEO of Adlumin.