These days, most businesses understand the importance of fighting cybercrime by protecting electronic data. But while no industry is safe from the threat of cybercrime, banks are especially vulnerable. For this reason, they have needed to take extraordinary measures to protect their data and the personal information of their clients.
No modern bank would be able to operate without advanced encryption protections on the vast amounts of transaction data that needs to be processed every single hour. But while banks employ some of the most rigorous cybersecurity protocols, hackers and other cyber criminals are constantly trying to find ways to work around these systems.
One of the most common ways of doing so is by exploiting weaknesses in internal communications practices to gain access to bank data.
Communications: The Weak Link in Cyber Security
Communication has always been a major challenge for companies that want to guarantee the best standards of data protection. Sending information digitally — especially when that information is being sent across international borders — always opens organizations up to the possibility that governments and third parties will be able to intercept and read these messages. This is especially true of common communication tools like email and SMS.
Even if banks institute rigorous protection standards and protocols for their stored data, if third parties can hack into day-to-day communications, they can leverage the information they harvest to bypass firewalls and gain access to sensitive account information.
If banks and other financial institutions want to ensure that their data remains safe from cybercriminals, a secure end-to-end communications strategy that revolves around encrypted smartphones is the only reliable solution.
Encryption is No Longer Optional for the Financial Services Industry
Encryption is the gold standard in digital security, and communicating via encrypted smartphone is the only way an organization can guarantee that no third party has access to internal messages and emails (this is especially true for financial organizations operating internationally).
The good news is that the latest encrypted smartphone technology from providers like ChatMail Secure makes safe communication easy.
ChatMail’s proprietary CAMP software (ChatMail Advanced Messaging and Parsing Protocol) allows users a full range of communication tools, including chat messages, voice messages, and image messages, and makes it easy for non-specialists to manage encrypted communications (you can click here to learn more about key generation and other user-friendly features).
And because CAMP doesn’t store any information outside of the phone itself, there is no way for data to be leaked if a server is compromised: the only way to access messages sent to a CAMP equipped phone is through the phone itself. With ChatMail’s advanced tamper-proof passwords options, any attempt to break into a phone manually will result in a complete wipe of sensitive information.
It is no secret that the banking of the future will be almost entirely electronic. Experts suggest that as the Millennial generation comes to dominate the North American financial services market in the next decade, financial institutions will need to adapt to an ever-more digital reality.
Increased cybersecurity measures will be an essential part of this, and this will mean that cutting-edge encryption tools will probably become the norm across the industry. Banks that want to get ahead of the curve should adopt encrypted smartphones now to stay ahead of the competition.
