When I think of bank robbers, I think of a group of people wearing dead president masks while yielding guns in the lobby of a bank. Mr. Pink being my personal favorite, from the hit movie “Reservoir Dogs”. Nonetheless, the reality is that today they’re not always that obvious and their weapon of choice isn’t always a gun. Let’s start with an example of the modern-day bank robber: a hacking group named Lazarus. Lazarus recently attempted a $1B bank heist against a Bangladesh bank where they were able to successfully route $81M over the bank’s SWIFT network—far more than the Reservoir Dogs could’ve pilfered. The only reason Lazarus didn’t make off with $1B was a spelling mistake! Leaves one wondering: Where was the bank’s cybersecurity program?
This attack and several others have led SWIFT to develop a customer security program. This program has three main goals:
- Protect and secure your organization’s SWIFT environment
- Prevent and detect fraud in your organization’s commercial SWIFT relationships.
- Enable continuous sharing of information within the SWIFT community to defend against cyberthreats.
Starting January 1, 2018, SWIFT requires all 11,000+ SWIFT member banks to either comply with this framework or deal with the consequences. While regulations are familiar to the financial industry, SWIFT’s Customer Security Programme is different because it doesn’t impose heavy fines. Instead, the compliance rating will be transparent to other member banks of the global messaging platform who may decide to avoid doing business with a member who is not in compliance. In addition, SWIFT may choose to exclude the non-compliant member from participating in their network.
So how can ForeScout help? ForeScout has the unique ability to identify visibility gaps within our SWIFT customers’ campus, data center and cloud environments while applying an application context to the endpoints. In addition, ForeScout can also assess those endpoints for compliance without the use of agents. If an endpoint is deemed non-compliant, ForeScout can remediate it and apply policy-based controls, leveraging orchestration and your existing infrastructure.
ForeScout has traditionally been seen as a campus tool, but today many of our customers are using the ForeScout platform as a single source of truth across their campus, datacenter and cloud environments. SWIFT is just one example of how ForeScout can very quickly provide real-time visibility and assess compliance for sensitive applications and devices, like black-box messaging gateways, across your infrastructure plant.
To secure your SWIFT infrastructure, you need comprehensive visibility of the components that comprise it. That’s what ForeScout does and all of this through a single pane of glass!
Equally important, our solution deploys swiftly across heterogeneous networks without impacting performance or latency.
Download the SWIFT Solution Brief and attend the webinar to see how it works.
