Financial institutions face an evolving threat landscape that requires enhanced visibility across all assets, regardless of location or infrastructure. This presents a range of considerable and rapidly evolving challenges, and, as a result, organisations need to continuously assess how all the moving parts in their security operations are organised and how they can make the most out of their infrastructure and team. 

To bring all the moving parts of a modern cybersecurity strategy together in a unified and coordinated approach, security leaders are increasingly looking towards the concept of a Cyber Fusion Center (CFC) – an approach which allows organisations to integrate their various security functions in a much more efficient way than traditional strategies. 

This can help address several pertinent security priorities for financial institutions, the first being visibility. By centralising threat intelligence and security analytics under a CFC model, financial institutions gain full visibility of the threat landscape and then work to significantly reduce response times to threats. 

Next is the availability of customised security strategies. Through CFC-enabled workflows, security teams can continually adapt and mould their response plans to address shifting regulatory policies, compliance requirements and scalability.

Cyber Fusion Use Cases 

In the financial sector, the implementation of Cyber Fusion Centers (CFCs) serves as a linchpin in fortifying defence mechanisms and streamlining operational efficiency. In doing so, they meet a wide range of important use cases: 

• Threat Intel Operationalisation: CFCs draw on both external (Commercial threat intelligence, ISAC advisories, OSINT sources, etc) and internal (SIEM, EDR, IDS/IPS, etc) threat intelligence to steer security processes to proactively defeat potential threats. 

• Threat Correlation and Analysis: By bringing together data from various sources, CFCs facilitate comprehensive incident impact assessment and in-depth investigations. 

• Information Sharing: They facilitate real-time information exchange within an organisation, encouraging cross-functional  collaboration.

• Cyber/Physical Incident Reporting: CFCs enable round-the-clock incident reporting via web or mobile, allowing the dissemination of enriched, anonymised threat intelligence among stakeholders in disparate locations. 

• Intel Collaboration: They foster collaboration by permitting security operation team members to request information on specific threats and collect intelligence based on these RFIs, enhancing cooperation amongst security teams. 

• Threat Response Automation: CFCs utilise SOAR to expedite threat response, deploying automated, cross-functional workflows across infrastructures.

• Threat Hunting: CFCs enable proactive threat hunting, particularly in legacy systems, using known vulnerability indicators to initiate response actions. 

• Financial Fraud Response: They automate the detection and response to financial fraud leading to cyber events, leveraging intelligence from diverse sources to correlate and analyse malicious activities. 

The list doesn’t end there, but the important point is that given the diverse range of requirements that occupy the time and resources of the typical security team, bringing these elements together is a crucial consideration. Without an integrated approach, security leaders across the finance ecosystem will struggle to maintain pace with the dynamic nature of cyber threats.