BANKS INCREASE SECURITY RISKS WITH SOFTWARE FLAWS That are not TACKLED

Veracode State of Software Security report reveals that the financial services sector gets control a year to remediate open vulnerabilities

Veracode's latest State of Software Security report (SoSS) revealed financial services is among the slowest industries to address common vulnerabilities present in its software. The global report found financial services companies required 29 days to address a quarter of their vulnerabilities in coding, and most a year – 574 days – to remediate all open vulnerabilities. It also ranked second-to-last of all sectors when it comes to speed to remediate flaws.

Significantly, 67 percent of applications utilized by banks are at risk from information leakage attacks, wherein an application reveals sensitive data that the attacker can use to exploit an internet application or its users. This really is concerning given the fact that global financial institutions are consistently a favourite target of attackers. Cryptographic issues (63 percent) and code quality issues (51 percent) are also among the top vulnerabilities in the financial sector.

In Veracode's SoSS report, an analysis of 70,000 application scans of its customers over a 12-month period, the biggest population of applications scanned originated from the financial vertical. While financial organisations generally have the reputation of having some of the most mature overall cybersecurity practices, Veracode's data shows they fight like the rest to stay on top of application security.

The industry ranked second to last across eight verticals for contemporary scan OWASP pass rate. Based on flaw persistence analysis – just how long flaws remain open after discovery – it is leaving coding flaws to linger more than other industries. However, the data also indicates a promising trend: as the banking sector addresses the very first half of its open flaws slowly, it starts to pick up speed once it passes the halfway point.

“Since financial institutions and banks hold highly valuable information and critical assets, they will continue to be a target of cybercriminals and malicious hacking,” said Paul Farrington, Director of EMEA and APJ at Veracode. “Our data shows the financial services sector scanning a huge volume of applications and finding flaws that require fixing. While that is encouraging, the following frontier is achieving greater speed in fixing those flaws because speed matters. The speed at which organisations fix flaws they discover in their code directly mirrors the level of risk incurred by applications. The sector should think about all dimensions of risk to prioritise which flaws to repair first.”

Read the full 2021 State of Software Security report here.