Contents

The CISO’s Guide to Security Remediation for Financial Services

Harnessing the power of unified remediation for ultimate visibility, vulnerability management, risk mitigation, and collaboration

Introduction

Ready to be the least surprised you’ve been all day? Financial services organizations have a major target on their backs when it comes to security. In fact, according to Fortune, in 2023 the industry suffered more data breaches than ever before—including one attack affecting nearly 1,000 institutions. And according to the 2024 CSA Security Remediation report, the average cost of a cloud breach amounts to a whopping $7,290,353.

CISOs know that data breaches can cause myriad issues not the least of which are financial loss, legal ramifications, and marred reputations. For these reasons, the financial services industry has over the past decade put particular emphasis on getting tools in place to detect potential threats before they create any level of damage.

But this creates its own set of problems.

With a variety of tools all doing their jobs and finding harmful “soft spots” in an organization’s architecture, security teams are bombarded with an avalanche of alerts – hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands—without being able to pinpoint the most critical issues to remediate first. And if that’s not enough, these teams also have to seek out root causes and issue owners which can take weeks. It’s a nightmare for security teams and the developers flooded with fix requests without clarity into the importance, criticality, or triage methodology.

To combat these problems, CISOs are turning to solutions that use data correlation, automation, and AI technologies to:

Cut through the noise of alerts and prioritize the ones that matter based on risk
Discover which secrets have been inadvertently exposed to the public, which resources are impacted, and who can fix them the fastest
Eliminate wasted time spent on false positives and duplicate alerts
Improve collaboration between security and engineering teams
And unify remediation across the board—from code and clouds to apps and infrastructure—for better reporting and risk management

This guide will take you through the state of security remediation today, examine the challenges and opportunities for security teams in financial services to harness the power of unified remediation, showcase companies like yours who have implemented winning strategies, and provide you with strategies to do the same in your own organization.

Let’s dive in.

Security challenges facing Financial Services organizations

Visibility in code-to-cloud environments

Some security teams are in a veritable blackout when it comes to gaining even adequate visibility into their environments due to inherent complexity. For financial services institutions, only 19% of organizations claim they have full visibility into their cloud environment, while 77% admit to having moderate or limited visibility. Even darker? 4% claim they have no visibility into their cloud environment at all.

It’s simple: you can’t fix what you can’t see. Hindered visibility leads to security gaps, complicated management and monitoring of environments, and overlooked pipelines (including shadow pipelines). The solution to the problem is gaining visibility into all deployments in the cloud environment automatically, consolidating disparate detection tools centrally, and uncomplicating the software development lifecycle (SDLC) tool landscape.(For more information on SDLC stages and tools, read the guide).

The “whack a mole” strain of security alerts

We’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is your security tools work well. The bad news is many are creating the same alerts, being triaged by different people, eventually transferred to different people to fix. Detection tools are extremely good at their jobs and can find vulnerability needles in haystacks, alerting teams to code flaws, misconfigurations, and exposed secrets just as they’re supposed to. But with multiple pipelines, apps, and scanners, your team is now dealing with a massive infusion of alerts popping up constantly—and often no single view to process that information and take action on the most critical issues first.

The “too effective for their own good” security tooling problem is further complicated with duplicate alerts and false positives. According to the CSA survey supporting their State of Security Remediation report, 65% of financial services organizations consider false positives to be a moderate to significant challenge with 61% feeling similarly about duplicate alerts.

Slow response times in addressing critical vulnerabilities

Ask any CISO what keeps him or her up at night and one answer will likely be “critical vulnerabilities” —and with good reason. Nearly 20% of financial services organizations report taking more than 4 days to address critical vulnerabilities, with 3% exceeding two weeks. These lagging response times may lead to prolonged risk exposures, which in turn increases the possibility that an organization will fall prey to attacker behavior. To combat this eventuality, security teams need to be able to quickly identify the most important fixes and prioritize those threats to minimize exposure. A prime way to do that effectively and efficiently? Automation, which we’ll get into now.

Manual overhead

We rarely hear a tech conversation nowadays without mention of automation and AI. It’s no wonder why; in the financial services industry, manual overhead in remediating security issues poses significant challenges, given the sector's stringent regulatory requirements and the high stakes involved. Manual remediation processes not only strain resources but also heighten the risk of human error, potentially resulting in severe financial losses and reputational damage.

Manual remediation processes are also time-consuming, hindering the swift response necessary to mitigate risks effectively. (Another startling fact – nearly three out of four organizations have security teams spending over 20% of their time performing manual tasks.) However, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) offer a transformative solution to these challenges.

By leveraging automation to orchestrate vulnerability remediation workflows, security teams can streamline repetitive tasks, accelerate response times, and prioritize high-risk vulnerabilities. AI-powered analytics further enhance detection capabilities, enabling organizations to proactively identify and remediate security issues before they escalate. With the ability to automatically correlate alerts, graph your environment, and drill down to the source of security issues, you can see root causes in seconds down to lines of code that are to blame.

“Band-aid” solutions and recurring risk

Three things are sure in life: death, taxes, and the likelihood of vulnerabilities to recur if a robust remediation solution and strategy aren’t in place. The CSA State of Security Remediation report shows that over half of the vulnerabilities addressed by security teams tend to recur within just a few months of fixing them the first time. This information indicates that there’s a pattern of fixing “symptoms” rather than the root cause. As a result, compliance issues can arise, internal security resources are mired down with re-work, and security risk soars higher.

In order to ensure issues are fixed properly, fully, and with the lowest amount of hassle possible, remediation solutions need to be able to:

Breakdowns in security team and developer collaboration

They say “good fences make good neighbors,” but not in the case of remediating security issues. The often fraught relationship between security teams and developers has become notorious; nearly 1 in 5 organizations report counterproductive relationships or no collaboration at all—a startling fact. Why the rift?

The eBook Cloud Security Remediation for Dummies puts it well:

Let’s start with your development team. What do they like to do? Code. Do they love remediating vulnerabilities? Of course not…this group is trying to keep up with deadlines and get code out the door, but those deadlines slip as the security team tosses new problems their way.”

How about cloud engineering teams? Their passion is making cloud transformation happen and they know their work is critical in the business. But they also know that they must safeguard the organization against threats. That’s challenging when you have developers using a bunch of different tools and not a whole lot of visibility into what’s happening in the software development lifecycle.

The key here is to find the middle ground. Remediation that works well gives developers a prioritized list of critical issues WITH the fixes, context, and root causes. For security teams, remediation should be a force multiplier in fast, efficient, and ideally automated visibility and fix delivery for issues that matter most. Organizations with a strong DevSecOps strategy and a remediation solution that not only detects but triages and surfaces suggestions for fixing issues tend to have a healthy, harmonious blend of development agility and security vigilance.

The proof in the pudding: Security remediation for financial services in action

A strong security remediation strategy and practice is necessary to overcome the aforementioned challenges financial services organizations encounter. But as LeVar Burton famously says in every episode of Reading Rainbow, “Don’t take my word for it!” Take a look at how financial services organizations of all sizes are benefiting from unified remediation.

A Fortune 500 company: Aggregating cloud security and infrastructure scanning issues in one place—and enabling developers to take action

A Fortune 500 financial services firm focused on global investments for pension funds, institutions and individuals had taken an aggressive stance on fostering digital transformation in the cloud—making investments across all areas of the business. With more than 60,000 containers and 3,000 code repositories, the security team’s main initiative was to refuge and mitigate risk with an extremely close eye and clear visibility into cloud assets and workloads. Without a security remediation platform in place, several challenges remained:

Fickle data: Duplicate alerts and false positives plagued teams and provided inadequate context to correlate between code and the pipeline that created it. In addition, a number of issues had just one root cause so collapsing and grouping them further became inconvenient and burdensome.
Mystery code owners: After manually collapsing alerts to root causes, security teams faced the laborious process of tracking down code owners responsible for fixing issues—often relying on spreadsheets, email, and more Zoom calls than necessary.
Remediation: Even if the team could hone in on root problems and owners, the process of fixing those problems took hours and hours of precious time.

When the Log4J vulnerability became a widespread issue for teams, the organization had had enough. It was time for an effective and efficient remediation solution. Through a simple API-based integration, the security team was able to discover, visualize, and fully map code-to-production development pipelines. The results? By focusing on the right issues, the team was able to boil 3,000 vulnerable alerts down to 62 fixes and 13 owners who could best make the fix. This meant a fix that could have taken months to orchestrate only took four days since the exact issues were automatically identified.

BHG Financial: Getting to the “root” of it

The BHG Financial team was on fire, developing dozens of applications in a fast-moving, cloud-based CI/CD pipeline process. However, they also found themselves on fire in a negative way, generating thousands of alerts—many of them duplicates— based on vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in multiple stages of development (namely QA, staging, and production). Even just a handful of root causes could balloon into hundreds of alerts. Furthermore, there wasn’t a unified view of their risk, making it difficult to gather, analyze, and triage alerts for developers. And beyond pipeline coverage, the security team also wanted to bolster up their ability to detect secrets in code and prevent data exposure.

By implementing a remediation solution, BHG Financial was able to:

Improve mean-time-to-remediate (MTTR) for critical issues and streamline the hunt for issue owners via automation
Map 34% of cloud misconfigurations to just 20 root causes
Trace 45 misconfiguration alerts from their cloud security solution to a single Terraform module
Map user access and permissions between its remediation platform and its directory service
Cultivate an efficient, developer-driven cloud security process

Questions to ask while seeking out a remediation solution

As you consider next steps in advancing your remediation process—which may involve seeking out a remediation platform— ask yourself these questions:

Am I able to accurately visualize issues in my code, clouds, applications, and infrastructure? If it’s not a unified view, you’re not only putting your team through unnecessary trouble, you’re also sacrificing the “omnisciency” you need for full awareness of your security situation at any given time. Find a solution that shows gaps in everything being built and run in your organization’s approved (and shadow) pipelines.
How do I currently prioritize issues? Speedier and more effective remediation requires a solution that provides a comprehensive code-to-cloud view, digs through alerts automatically, surfaces context for those alerts, determines potential associated risk of leaving that alert untouched, and bubbles up remediation next-steps.
How do I find owners and root causes? Bring data from all of your SDLC and security detection tools into one solution; from there you’ll be able to automatically identify owners and root causes down to lines of code.
Am I effectively communicating the right information to various stakeholders with properly tailored reports? Seek out a solution with custom role-based views and reports for everyone from the developer to the business unit general manager to the board.
If I do automate, when will I see results? Depending on the solution, you can clearly see where issues exist within hours. Many organizations see mean-time-to-remediate MTTR improve by 90% or more overall.
Are security teams and developers working in harmony? If you see friction in that relationship—or lack thereof—consider a solution that significantly reduces alert noise, detects critical issues first and suggests fixes, and automatically sends those suggestions to developers in their preferred workflow (Jira, GitHub, etc.).

Conclusion

Safeguarding the integrity and resilience of your on-prem and cloud infrastructure demands a proactive and holistic approach to security remediation. It takes continuous monitoring, agile response mechanisms, and a culture of vigilance and collaboration, to navigate the complex landscape of cybersecurity challenges, ensuring the trust and stability vital to the industry's success.

Thank you for your interest in: