Financial Services’ Cyber Security Journey

Overview

This financial services company is the largest family-owned finance company in the United States dedicated to helping manufacturers, distributors, resellers, and franchisees be more successful.

Our Solution

Exposure Management

Challenge

The chief information security officer (CISO) protecting this finance company is more than a professional responsibility; it's a deep commitment and an extension of a career built on service. As a ten-year veteran of the United States Air Force, this CISO went on to spend over fifteen years safeguarding banks and financial institutions; and he brought that same mission-driven mindset when he joined the company as CISO in 2017. Today, the CISO leads a 15-member enterprise security group responsible for everything from cyber security operations and business continuity to physical security and identity management—all in service of a pillar CISO principle: help people win. "I love our mission. Help people win," the CISO said. "When you anchor yourself to that, it makes life easier because everybody's pulling the rope in the same direction."

We were specifically looking for attack surface management capabilities, but when we found Check Point's platform, it opened our eyes to the possibility that we could combine many of the tools we were using into one.

As this financial services company grew over the years, its hybrid cloud environment expanded and became increasingly complex as it evolved to meet the demands of its customers and roughly 800 employees. As the CISO's team found itself securing an expanding environment, they increasingly relied on a growing number of point security tools. These included a vendor for deep- and dark-web monitoring, another for attack surface management, and additional systems for threat intelligence. And each product had its own dashboard, reporting mechanism, and metrics, forcing analysts to toggle between multiple consoles to correlate data and assess external risk. "The biggest challenge we faced was having disparate systems that performed similar capabilities," the CISO said. "We thought it'd be better to combine these capabilities into a single quality platform. Unfortunately, we'd never seen it done, let alone done well," he added.

The fragmented toolsets also created challenges when it came to the team providing risk reports to executives. Without a way to deliver an enterprise-wide risk score, communicating the organization's threat posture to the board and senior leadership required significant manual effort to aggregate enough of the right data from multiple sources to compile a comprehensive report. For a financial institution, finding a way to more easily and comprehensively demonstrate risk to executives, the board, and regulators became essential.

Solution

When the security team began their search, this CISO explained that they initially sought a way to manage externally facing vulnerabilities but soon learned they could accomplish much more. "We were specifically looking for attack surface management capabilities," the CISO said. "But when we found Check Point's platform, it opened our eyes to the possibility that we could combine many of the tools we were using into one."

The Check Point platform that opened those possibilities was Check Point Exposure Management. Check Point Exposure Management enables organizations like this financial services company to combine attack surface management, deep and dark web monitoring, and threat intelligence into a single platform. "The farther we dug, the more we liked what we were seeing," he added.

Check Point Exposure Management unifies threat intelligence, attack surface visibility, and automated remediation to help organizations continuously discover, prioritize, and close security exposures before attackers can exploit them—integrating with more than 75 existing security controls across an organization's network, endpoint, cloud, email, and identity layers.

The CISO also enrolled in Check Point's elite service, which provides dedicated live expert security analyst support. For a 15-person security team that can't afford to send engineers to train on every system, the Elite program delivers expert guidance that helps maximize the platform's potential. The analysts conduct regular check-ins, build actionable to-do lists, proactively identify emerging risks, and help tune the system to reduce false positives—all far more cost-effectively than building equivalent expertise in-house. "For a security team our size, it just makes a ton of sense to have those experts behind the product itself," the CISO said. "It's really much more cost-effective than trying to build out that expertise internally."

Outcome

"We have one number that provides us a full perspective on our risk," the CISO said. "That makes it easy for me to report our status to our leadership," he added. Today, the board sees clear, color-coded risk indicators that simplify what was previously a complex and time-consuming reporting exercise.

And this financial services company's new threat intelligence capabilities have already delivered concrete value. For instance, a recent Check Point threat report highlighted an uptick in website defacement attacks across North America—a threat the CISO’s team would not have previously anticipated. Acting on this intelligence, the security team audited their web properties and discovered one of their service providers was not delivering the level of protection they had expected, prompting immediate corrective action.

"The threat intelligence provided by Check Point not only helps us to understand better what's going on throughout the threat landscape, but it's helping us make better decisions based on concrete information," the CISO said.

Finally, Check Point's elite service provides the CISO with live analyst support that has also proven extremely valuable. Check Point's analysts are proactive in guiding the team, surfacing issues before the CISO must go looking for them. The team has already tuned the system to provide signals rather than noise—for instance, adjusting look-alike domain detection settings that initially generated excessive alerts—and continues to optimize the platform with Check Point's expert guidance.

"Check Point has been very proactive, which is exactly the level of relationship we were looking for: someone to be proactive with us instead of us having to ask them to guide us," the CISO said.

As a ten-year veteran of the United States Air Force, the CISO went on to spend over fifteen years safeguarding banks and financial institutions. And at this financial services company, the CISO succeeded in what he set out to do: bring the same mission-driven mindset he found in the U.S. Air Force. And with some support from Check Point, he succeeded in guiding this financial services company's security posture from reactive and managed across too many tools to one that proactively mitigates risks.