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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance By John Grady, Principal Analyst Enterprise Strategy Group

March 2025

W H I T E P A P E R

This Enterprise Strategy Group White Paper was commissioned by Check Point Software and is distributed under license from TechTarget, Inc.

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Contents Executive Summary ....................................................................................................................................................... 3

Financial Services Organizations Face A Complex Threat Landscape and Compliance Environment ....................... 3

GenAI As a Threat Enabler ........................................................................................................................................ 5

Consequences of Successful Attacks ........................................................................................................................ 6

Prioritizing Vendors That Support Zero Trust and Cybersecurity Mesh, Protect Against Advanced Threats, And Enable Operational Efficiency ........................................................................................................................................ 7

Zero Trust ................................................................................................................................................................... 7

GenAI .......................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Web Application and API Security .............................................................................................................................. 9

The Role of Platforms ................................................................................................................................................. 9

How the Check Point Infinity Platform Can Help ........................................................................................................... 9

Conclusion .....................................................................................................................................................................11

© 2025 TechTarget, Inc. All Rights Reserved 3

White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Executive Summary All organizations, especially those in the financial services industry, continue to struggle with environmental complexity, the regulatory landscape, and threats that will only become more difficult to defend against with the ongoing application of artificial intelligence. The stakes are high, and successful attacks can have significant impacts on the business. Security teams should prioritize vendors and partners that can provide solutions to help operationalize zero trust, support generative AI (GenAI) use cases, protect public web applications and APIs that house and transmit sensitive data, and do so using a platform approach (such as Cybersecurity Mesh) to support operational excellence. The Check Point Infinity Platform delivers these capabilities, ultimately enabling financial services organizations to more efficiently build cyber resilience and maintain brand integrity.

Financial Services Organizations Face A Complex Threat Landscape and Compliance Environment Financial services organizations are under tremendous pressure to prioritize innovation and agility while ensuring the proper safeguards are in place to protect corporate assets and customer data. While this is a reality for organizations across many industries, it is particularly true of financial services organizations. The competitiveness of the sector, the regulatory aspects of the industry, and focus from attackers due to the sensitive and valuable customer information financial services organizations handle all play into this.

Research from Informa TechTarget’s Enterprise Strategy Group highlights some of the top network security challenges financial services organizations cited (see Figure 1).1 Among the most impactful challenges cited were complexity, maintaining compliance, and the threat landscape.

The distributed nature of financial services environments drives complexity. Even as organizations continue to move workloads to the cloud, on-premises data centers remain a reality. This puts additional stress on cybersecurity teams as they try to ensure consistent visibility and protection across all aspects of the environment. In many cases, security tools are layered on as the enterprise footprint expands. Unless properly integrated, which takes time and costs money, siloed security tools often deliver diminishing returns. Operationally, they create complexity, and, ultimately, security effectiveness and incident response time can be affected. This can occur either from the reliance on duplicative manual processes, which can lead to human error, or from inconsistent tool use and variable protections across different parts of the environment.

The financial services industry is one of the most heavily regulated in the world. Industry-specific regulations such as the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) in the United States, the Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA) in Europe, and Measures for the Administration of the Protection of Consumer Rights and Interests by Banking and Insurance Institutions in China are some examples. Broader regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), and the recent Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) changes to cyber incident reporting requirements all impact financial services organizations as well. In the U.S., a myriad of state regulations also come into play. Because these regulations can cut across preventative tools, monitoring, identity controls, data handling, incident disclosure, and more, a variety of capabilities are required. This makes meeting these regulations and regularly reporting on compliance operationally complex.

1 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, The Evolution of Network Security: What Security Teams Require From Firewalls in a Cloud-centric World, October 2024.

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Figure 1. Network Security Challenges

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

On top of these issues, the threat landscape itself continues to pose problems. In fact, Check Point has found that the financial services sector is targeted with an average of 1,510 attacks weekly, an increase of 30% over 2023.2 Attackers continue to target known vulnerabilities and leverage traditional malware and ransomware, while also taking advantage of zero days and more distributed environments to move laterally within an organization. The effects of previous high-profile attacks on CapitalOne, Equifax, and Experian are well known, yet these attacks continue. Some recent attacks include:

• California-based LoanDepot was attacked by threat actor Blackcat in January 2024. The incident exposed names, addresses, financial account numbers, phone numbers, and birth dates of 16.9 million customers, causing disruptions at the company for nearly two weeks and ultimately costing $26.9 million.3

2 Source: “State of Cyber Security 2025,” checkpoint.com, January 2025. 3 Source: Eduard Kovacs, Ransomware Attack Cost LoanDepot $27 Million, securityweek.com, August 7, 2024.

27%

27%

33%

33%

36%

36%

36%

36%

40%

44%

Managing IaaS network security costs

Managing an increase in threat sophistication

Ensuring collaboration between different groups responsible for network security

Keeping pace with the rate of change in our public cloud infrastructure environment

Securing applications born in the cloud

Managing an increase in threat volume

Ensuring consistent security policies across our entire environment

Detecting threats in encrypted traffic

Ensuring compliance requirements are met

Maintaining consistent visibility across our entire environment

What network security challenges does your organization face with securing its on-premises data center/private cloud and public cloud

infrastructure environments? (Percent of respondents, N=45, multiple responses accepted)

https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://www.checkpoint.com/security-report/___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjVlOTk6NGQyMDc2MWJlOWEzNDNkMWRjZTM1ZTJlODUxZWQ1YWI3N2QzMWNmZTFiN2IzZjY3M2M4NjBmZDk1ZGRhZGJmNDpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://www.securityweek.com/ransomware-attack-cost-loandepot-27-million/___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OmIzYTc6ZjNkZDM2ZDYzMjZjMDhlMzk1ZmRjODEwZmI3MTJmNmUzMGFlNDA5ZTZjYjYwMTc0YzcyYjk1YjQ3NmYzNmVmYjpwOkY6Tg

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

• Evolve Bank & Trust, based in Memphis, Tennessee, suffered a breach affecting 7.6 million people in July 2024 perpetrated by LockBit. Names, Social Security numbers, Evolve account numbers, birth dates, and contact information were compromised.4

• A data breach disclosed by Prudential Financial affected 2.5 million people in February 2024. The data stolen by threat actor Blackcat included names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and other identification card numbers.5

• European bank Santander was attacked in May 2024. A threat actor claimed to have stolen millions of customers’ bank account details and credit card numbers using the bank’s Snowflake instance.6

• Latitude Financial in Australia suffered an attack in March 2023, which saw the personal data of up to 14 million customers stolen and cost the company $76 million, according to its financial statements.7

• An unnamed multi-national corporation experienced a deep fake scam that resulted in $25 million of fraudulent wire transfers after AI-generated colleagues directed the transfer during a video conference call.8

GenAI As a Threat Enabler

While there are obvious benefits security teams can gain from GenAI, nearly all financial services organizations feel attackers have the advantage on this front. Overall, 92% of respondents to Enterprise Strategy Group research believed that, as GenAI innovation continues, cyber adversaries will gain the biggest advantage.9 These advantages will manifest in a variety of ways, including:10

• Attack efficiency. More than one-third (37%) expect attackers to use GenAI to adapt social engineering attacks based on the responses and behaviors of individual targets. This will enable them to react quicker and scale their attacks more easily. Similarly, 25% believe GenAI will help attackers automate and optimize their attacks overall.

• Attack effectiveness. One-third (33%) expect GenAI to help attackers create new malware that will evade traditional security measures, while 31% expect GenAI to help attackers with brute force attacks.

• Exploiting corporate use of GenAI tools. The use of GenAI by financial services organizations will also be exploited. Thirty-one percent expect the GenAI solutions they use to be targeted, while 24% believe the GenAI tools their partners use will be targeted. Additionallt, 20% believe attackers will corrupt their GenAI data sets.

4 Source: Ionut Arghire, Evolve Bank Data Breach Impacts 7.6 Million People, securityweek.com, July 9, 2024. 5 Source: Ionut Arghire, Prudential Financial Data Breach Impacts 2.5 Million, securityweek.com, July 1, 2024. 6 Source: Joe Tidy, Santander staff and ‘30 million’ customers hacked, bbc.com, June 2, 2024. 7 Source: Denham Sadler, Data breach cost Latitude $76 million, ia.acs.org, August 22, 2023. 8 Source: Benj Edwards, Deepfake scammer walks off with $25 million in first-of-its-kind AI heist, arstechnica.com, February 2024. 9 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Generative AI for Cybersecurity: An Optimistic but Uncertain Future, April 2024. 10 Ibid.

https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://www.securityweek.com/evolve-bank-data-breach-impacts-7-6-million-people/___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjEwNGM6NWUxMzZjZTVmYTk3ZGQzMzc1MzVmODliYmJhODM2OTM1MWM2NDZlMTkyNWUyMjA5ZDkxOTYwNDhhNjdhMTM2NjpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://www.securityweek.com/prudential-financial-data-breach-impacts-2-5-million/___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjBmYjI6MGZiNTQ0MWYzMzIwMDRjNmEzZGI4N2Y0M2M3YzVkNjlmNmJmM2RkZGJjMGVjNmZkNjdiNTQ1ZjViNTU2MjgyYTpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6ppv06e3n8o___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OmExODA6NzQ3YmJhNWU5MTU1YzM2YzkxNWFiM2IzZTg5YTRlYmEyYzdhMjkwZTE5OTE1MGZiMDE4NGVhYzdkY2ZkNjhlZDpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2023/data-breach-cost-latitude--76-million.html___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3Ojk3Mzk6YjUwNDlhODg1NDk5ZDIxYjhmMTk3ODc5Y2ZhNDE5NDBjZTkyMjhlZmEwOWE4YTk0ZGY4M2YzN2RlMjA4NGFkZTpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/deepfake-scammer-walks-off-with-25-million-in-first-of-its-kind-ai-heist/___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OmVjNTU6YjU4YTY4MjJmZDU4ZjM5OWViMGY3YzYzNzQ4YzUyZDdjYTUwNTNlOGU3YTIzMjM0OTE0YmM1MGYyZGZjMDk4NDpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515201778/Toc___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjBmNGY6ZThmMDE3OGU5NDU4Zjg5OWU5OGVkYjA1ZDc5N2Q4YzMxMWEzODg0YzczYTQxYTQ4MmJiNGQ3NThjOWYxNDIxNTpwOkY6Tg

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Figure 2. Expectations Among Financial Services of How GenAI Will Be Used by Adversaries

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

Consequences of Successful Attacks

Most importantly, and regardless of whether an attack uses GenAI or not, there are a variety of business impacts that result from a successful campaign. As noted earlier, the compromise of LoanDepot ultimately cost the company $26.9 million. But there are other impacts, as well, that impact the security team, customers, and the business overall (see Figure 3).11

The most common outcome from an attack cited by Enterprise Strategy Group research respondents is application downtime. When resources become unavailable or are taken offline for remediation following an attack, businesses can be significantly disrupted. Many of the other outcomes respondents pointed to are directly related to application downtime. When resources are unavailable, customer experience is affected. If these applications are revenue- generating, there is a direct effect on the bottom line. In instances where customer data is compromised, compliance issues can result. This can also have a cost impact if fines are imposed. Even if there is no compliance or direct revenue loss from an attack, brand perception can suffer, which can affect brand standing and shareholder value.

11 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Trends in Modern Application Protection, July 2022.

18%

20%

20%

24%

25%

25%

31%

31%

33%

37%

Creating highly realistic phishing emails and social engineering scams

Corrupting a generative AI data set

Developing realistic voice and image impersonations that can be used for social engineering attacks and fraud

Targeting our expanded attack surface caused by the generative AI solutions our partners use

Automating and optimizing cyberattacks, making them faster, more efficient, and harder to detect

Creating fake news and disinformation campaigns

Conducting brute force attacks that can crack passwords much faster than traditional methods

Targeting our expanded attack surface caused by the generative AI solutions we use

Creating new malware strains that can evade traditional security measures

Adapting social engineering tactics based on the responses and behaviors of individual targets

Generative AI may be used by cyber-adversaries for offensive purposes. Which of the following use cases is most concerning to you? (Percent of

respondents, N=51, three responses accepted)

https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515201507/Toc___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OmEwOWE6NDBlYzRhOTc5ZTRmZDM2ZmRiY2I3ZjllNDg4M2EzMjVlM2RmNmMzZGYyNTMwMjc2MjM4ZDA5MWQzYmUyM2EyMDpwOkY6Tg

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Figure 3. Impacts From Web Application and API Attacks

Source: Enterprise Strategy Group, a division of TechTarget, Inc.

Prioritizing Vendors That Support Zero Trust and Cybersecurity Mesh, Protect Against Advanced Threats, And Enable Operational Efficiency While financial services organizations have a lot of competing priorities, all would benefit from implementing strong threat prevention, simplifying operational complexity, building cyber resilience, and streamlining compliance. Granted, these are broad goals that would seem to require a variety of solutions and actions to achieve. But while that can be true, focusing on a few priority areas can generate significant benefits and value across the business. Specifically, security teams should emphasize zero-trust tenets across the environment, implement AI-enabled solutions to support both threat prevention and security operations, and ensure web applications and APIs are protected to the fullest extent possible.

Zero Trust

Zero-trust architectures have become critical in helping organizations modernize their security strategy and keep pace with a more aggressive threat landscape. By removing implicit trust from the environment and ensuring users, devices, workloads, and other entities only have access to the minimum resources needed to perform their function, security teams can limit lateral movement and greatly reduce the effects of an attack when one does occur. Zero trust is not a new concept, and, at this point, many organizations have moved forward with the strategy. Among the financial services organizations that Enterprise Strategy Group has surveyed, there is strong evidence these initiatives are paying dividends. Specifically:12

12 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Research Report, Trends in Zero Trust: Strategies and Practices Remain Fragmented, but Many Are Seeing Success, March 2024.

31%

32%

33%

35%

38%

39%

41%

49%

Compliance issues

Loss of revenue

Additional web application protection products or services added

Negative customer experiences

Infrastructure cost overruns

Negative impact to shareholder value or brand standing

Team members were impacted

Application downtime

What types of impacts did your organization experience from attacks on its web applications and APIs? (Percent of respondents, N=111, multiple

responses accepted)

https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515201747/Toc___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjcwOWY6MzYzOWYwYWM3ZTk3NDkzZTdmODkyZmJmYmY0ZjAwYjM5ODcyYjA5ZmY3MGY0NjY1YmUzY2Y1YzY0M2U1OWVkZDpwOkY6Tg https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515201747/Toc___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjcwOWY6MzYzOWYwYWM3ZTk3NDkzZTdmODkyZmJmYmY0ZjAwYjM5ODcyYjA5ZmY3MGY0NjY1YmUzY2Y1YzY0M2U1OWVkZDpwOkY6Tg

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

• 78% agreed that zero trust has decreased the number of cyber incidents, with an average reduction of 30%. • 67% agreed that zero trust has decreased the number of data breaches they have experienced. • 80% agreed that zero trust has improved security operations center (SOC) efficiency. • 71% agreed that zero trust has reduced the effort needed to maintain and report on compliance. • 81% agreed that zero trust has decreased mean time to respond, with an average reduction of 11 days.

GenAI

Beyond zero trust, the conversation around security and AI has accelerated, and it is important to note there are a few aspects to this. Security vendors have used analytics for threat detection for years and are now incorporating AI to improve efficacy and detection speed, devise a countermeasure, and deploy in seconds. When incidents do occur, the use of AI copilots to help guide SOC analysts through investigative efforts and automate response is becoming common. Finally, there is a need to secure the employee use of public GenAI apps such as ChatGPT to prevent misuse, stop data leakage, and protect brand reputation.

With regard to the first use case, attackers are increasingly using malware and other exploits that traditional signature-based defenses cannot detect. To combat this, threat intelligence and analytics have become a critical component of the threat detection and mitigation process. Yet traditional analytics can struggle to keep pace as attackers continue to innovate and the amount of telemetry grows. Applying AI models to this data helps security teams improve not only efficacy, but also the speed at which threats can be detected and mitigated.

Once a threat is uncovered, understanding the attack path, what resources were affected, how best to remediate, and doing all this as quickly as possible becomes critical. GenAI can help security analysts by directing workflows, uncovering patterns, and, ultimately, simplifying the investigative and response process. There is significant optimism in this area, with 96% of Enterprise Strategy Group research respondents agreeing that GenAI will greatly enhance the efficacy and efficiency of security operations tools like extended detection and response (XDR) and security incident and event management (SIEM).13

Finally, employee use of public GenAI tools represents an important new threat vector security teams must address. As is the case with SaaS applications generally, many organizations are writing policies around how GenAI applications can be used, who can use them, and which applications are sanctioned. For a financial services organization, the potential for sensitive customer data to be exposed by these tools represents a clear threat vector. Additionally, other scenarios, including employees retrieving and using inaccurate information from these tools, can have negative impacts on the business, including strategy, planning, and even brand reputation.

This makes it critical for GenAI usage policies to be consistently and effectively enforced, as security must support innovation and the competitive advantages of AI tools. Traditional cloud access security brokers might be able to control general access to GenAI applications. Yet security teams need additional visibility into the prompts being sent and, most importantly, the potentially sensitive data being shared with the large language models. Given the sensitivity of the data financial services firms are stewards of, and the regulations they face, ensuring the visibility and control over GenAI usage should be a top priority. Financial organizations should consider moving beyond

13 Source: Enterprise Strategy Group Complete Survey Results, 2024 XDR and SOC Modernization Trends, May 2024.

96% of Enterprise Strategy Group research respondents agree that GenAI will greatly enhance the efficacy and efficiency of security operations tools like XDR and SIEM.

https://protect.checkpoint.com/v2/r02/___https://research.esg-global.com/reportaction/515201807/Toc___.YzJlOmNwYWxsOmM6bzozODM1NjExYjg4Yzk3N2UzYjUxNjlkMzY5MDI4ZmIxYzo3OjBmOTU6MTdlNGVmNzQxMWE4NmVlZDhjMTkyOWEwZTBkN2RjZjFjZmRmODQ0OGJmOThmYTc3YmE5ZGQ4NTYzNGViNGJkYjpwOkY6Tg

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

cloud access security brokers to tools that provide visibility into unauthorized activity in real time and offer AI- enhanced DLP to prevent sensitive information from being shared with unauthorized AI tools.

Web Application and API Security

Any application or corporate resource can be a target for attackers. Yet, because web applications and APIs often have sensitive customer information, strong, dedicated security here is incredibly important. Additionally, the fact that these applications are often directly tied to revenue and customer engagement makes downtime and security incidents much more impactful for the organization.

Web application firewalls (WAFs) have historically had the perception of being difficult to deploy, configure, and manage. Tuning WAF rules is an ongoing process that takes time and can often lead to legitimate traffic being blocked. In some cases, security teams run WAFs in alert-only mode specifically to avoid this issue. Other security teams ignore an overwhelming number of false-positive alerts, even though there are legitimate issues hidden in that noise. To rectify this, security teams need alternative detection methods that do not rely solely on signatures and rules but leverage AI and advanced analytics and consider the behavior of the application and legitimate users. Further, because web applications are increasingly reliant on APIs, these protections must be extended from the application itself to the API endpoints that comprise it.

The Role of Platforms

While zero trust, GenAI, and web application and API security are important, financial services firms need to promote efficiency and simplify wherever possible—not at the expense of security but instead to enable stronger protection by enabling security teams to spend more time being proactive, rather than living in detection mode and only addressing fire drill after fire drill. The idea of platforms is a key trend in cybersecurity today. To be clear, no single platform or vendor can address every aspect of cybersecurity. However, there are clear benefits to consolidating where possible. Reducing the number of management interfaces admins and analysts must use not only promotes efficiency but can reduce human error from having to write duplicative policies in different places with different syntaxes. Audits are simplified when there is a centralized, single source of truth showing compliance across multiple tools, capabilities, and hosting locations. Prioritizing vendors that provide the overarching capabilities discussed and support these goals using a centralized platform approach can help build cyber resilience, improve efficiency, streamline regulatory compliance, lower costs, and maintain brand integrity.

How the Check Point Infinity Platform Can Help The Check Point Infinity Platform is an AI-powered, cloud-delivered security management platform that can help reduce complexity, lower total cost of ownership, and tighten risk posture, while blocking the most sophisticated threats. It provides comprehensive real-time threat prevention, powered by more than 55 AI engines to protect against zero-day malware, phishing, DNS, and other advanced attacks. Its unified management console helps security teams work more efficiently and shares threat intelligence across the environment. Some of the specific products included in the Infinity Platform are:

• Check Point Quantum Firewalls and Compliance Blade Solutions. Check Point reduces the burden of compliance while continuously protecting sensitive financial data. Quantum security gateways and firewalls deliver advanced threat prevention, policy management, remote access VPN, IoT security, and SD-WAN and support granular network micro-segmentation across public and private cloud and LAN environments. One console manages access control across networks, clouds, and IoT for operational efficiency and cost

To be clear, no single platform or vendor can address every aspect of cybersecurity. However, there are clear benefits to consolidating where possible.

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

reduction. Check Point’s compliance blades automate policy updates and compliance checks, with support for regulations like PCI-DSS, SOX, and GDPR.

• CloudGuard Network and Web Application Firewall for Cloud. CloudGuard protects public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments from advanced threats. CloudGuard Network Security integrates with leading IaC tools for rapid deployment, agility, and automation of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows. It extends on-premises security to the cloud with consistent policies across public and private clouds. CloudGuard WAF is a cloud-native web and API security solution that provides precise threat prevention using contextual AI to protect apps and APIs against known and unknown threats without relying on signatures. It prevents zero-day threats by using ML-based security without signature updates, finding attacks while eliminating constant fine-tuning and exception creation. It offers CI/CD-friendly deployment and automation—from installation to upgrades, to configuration—using declarative IaC or APIs.

• Harmony Endpoint, Email and SASE. Harmony provides user protection for employees regardless of device, location, or the application they’re using. It protects against sophisticated threats like phishing and ransomware. By combining email protection, endpoint protection, web protection, as well as GenAI and SaaS protection, users are protected everywhere they work, while security teams can ensure consistency across the entire workspace. Zero-trust network access ensures employees gain access only to what they need and only when granular policy rules are met.

• XDR/XPR and the automation benefits of Playblocks. Check Point takes a prevention-first approach to XDR. Infinity XDR/XPR leverages threat data from across the environment to empower security and SOC teams to detect stealthy multivector attacks. Infinity Playblocks automated response takes cross-vector collaborative preventative actions to immediately contain threats, prevent damage, mitigate lateral spread, and reduce operational overhead.

• External Risk Management. Check Point Infinity External Risk Management is a unified SaaS solution that continuously monitors for and proactively reduces external cyber-risk. It combines threat intelligence, deep and dark web monitoring, credential leak monitoring, purloined data for sale, executive specific risks, website clones including take down service, external attack surface management looking for vulnerabilities and missing patches everywhere, digital risk protection, and supply chain and partner risk intelligence to quickly identify and mitigate cyber-risks before they develop into costly security incidents.

• Infinity AI Copilot. Infinity AI Copilot helps security analysts and administrators improve incident mitigation and response by leveraging GenAI in threat hunting, analysis, and resolution. Administrators can ask to investigate a firewall issue and recommend a rule to fix it, saving time, improving resolution accuracy, and helping junior analysts scale their productivity.

• GenAI Protect. Check Point GenAI Protect provides visibility into the GenAI services used in the organization, assesses their risk, and applies AI-powered data protection. It can block the submission of prompts that contain sensitive personal or financial data, enabling financial services institutions to harness GenAI while maintaining strict regulatory compliance.

By combining these tool sets in a single platform, Check Point helps customers across a variety of metrics. With a centralized approach and dedicated compliance blade, organizations can streamline audits and lower the compliance burden. A unified management console supporting multiple tools reduces complexity and lowers the potential for human error when writing duplicative policies. Working with one vendor across multiple areas can help result in lower product costs through greater discounts, as well as lower operational costs, by requiring training on fewer tools for security analysts. Consolidated platforms often offer superior performance of critical KPIs like mean time to remediate. Ultimately, this consolidated approach can help financial services organizations more efficiently build cyber resilience and maintain brand integrity.

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White Paper: Guide for Financial Services Institutions to Prevent Threats and Maintain Compliance

Conclusion Historically, the belief in the cybersecurity industry has been that there were tradeoffs to be made between strong security and operational efficiency. Terms like “best-of-breed” and “all-in-one” were somewhat misleading and implied that organizations had to prioritize one over the other. However, the reality today is that, through platform approaches, security teams can enjoy the best of both worlds. Enterprise-class security vendors, which have historically offered broad sets of tools to address a variety of use cases and provided strong threat detection supported by global threat intelligence, now understand the critical need to tie their offerings together with unified platforms to reduce complexity, lower costs, and strengthen security.

The Check Point Infinity Platform is a clear example of this trend, with capabilities supporting network security, user security, web application security, and security operations. Through its focus on zero trust, GenAI use and protections, and AI-driven web application security, Check Point Infinity can help financial institutions build cyber resilience, promote efficiency, streamline regulatory compliance, and maintain brand integrity.

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Executive Summary Financial Services Organizations Face A Complex Threat Landscape and Compliance Environment GenAI As a Threat Enabler Consequences of Successful Attacks

Prioritizing Vendors That Support Zero Trust and Cybersecurity Mesh, Protect Against Advanced Threats, And Enable Operational Efficiency Zero Trust GenAI Web Application and API Security The Role of Platforms

How the Check Point Infinity Platform Can Help Conclusion