industry unlocked
ALLIED BANK ADOPTS A PROACTIVE SECURITY STRATEGY WITH RECORDED FUTURE INTELLIGENCE
Pakistan ’ s largest bank relies on Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud to detect and respond to threats before they can do harm . Awais Ejaz , Group Head / CISO , Information Security and Governance at Allied Bank , tells us more about the collaboration and its business benefits .
he financial services
T industry is changing quickly as institutions undergo Digital Transformations to meet client expectations for a digital and online banking experience . But while digital technologies are critical to innovation , they also expose financial institutions – already a favoured target among threat actors – to greater risk .
As the oldest and one of the largest banks in Pakistan with more than 1,400 branches across the country , Allied Bank understands the importance of proactively protecting its brand and digital assets .
That ’ s why Allied Bank turned to Recorded Future to help it implement a proactive security strategy with intelligence at its core .
“ Threat actors are looking at your digital footprint outside the organisation to launch an attack . You must take proactive measures . You have to monitor your digital assets . You have to remediate incidents . You must proactively protect your brand and your image . To do that you need timely intelligence . That is a must-have for any organisation , but especially in the financial sector ,” said Awais Ejaz , Group Head / CISO , Information Security and Governance at Allied Bank .
Proactively getting in front of attackers
Allied Bank ’ s security team ’ s strategy is to stay a step ahead of threat actors by proactively monitoring and protecting its external attack surface . The team sought a digital risk protection platform that would provide visibility into the bank ’ s digital assets and any abuse of the brand logo , including phishing pages , fake mobile applications and data leakage on the Dark Web .
“ The biggest challenge we faced – the reason we opted for Recorded Future – was we did not have enough visibility into Allied Bank ’ s digital asset inventory . We wanted to be able to see what digital inventory information was out there and to be alerted if any anomalies were detected ,” added Ejaz .
The team also recognised the opportunity to improve its threat-hunting capabilities with more targeted threat intelligence . Allied Bank already had threat intelligence feeds coming from different publicly available resources but correlating this data and analysing it in the context of threat activity within the financial industry was time-consuming , error-prone and not all-encompassing . The team wanted enriching and enhanced intelligence on a consolidated platform .
After evaluating several intelligence vendors , Allied Bank chose Recorded Future . “ Unlike other competitors , the main differentiating reason that we selected Recorded Future was the huge amount of sources from which it is gathering intelligence ,” said Ejaz .
Recorded Future provides a comprehensive view of Allied Bank ’ s threat landscape through a combination of automated analytics , human-finished
Awais Ejaz , Group Head / CISO , Information Security and Governance at Allied Bank
44 www . intelligentciso . com