SC Magazine: Small, minority-led banks and credit unions face greater cyber risk

On January 11, 2022, NetSPI CTO Travis Hoyt was featured in an article written by Karen Hoffman for SC Magazine. Read the full article online here.

+ + +

In cybersecurity, as in many areas, the “little guy” gets squeezed. Such is the apparent case with the financial industry, where small and minority-led financial services institutions (FSIs) and credit unions are feeling greater pressure and impact from online threats.

In recent months, this has grown beyond being a basic IT security, or even banking, issue into being a political one, as FSI executives and the Congress representatives who support them have made their case that smaller and emerging community-based FSIs need greater cybersecurity support from regulators, larger fellow FSIs and the core processors that typically support these small FSIs.

…

As Travis Hoyt, chief technology officer at NetSPI, pointed out, smaller banks, minority-led institutions, and credit unions have had an issue with cyberattacks for a number of years, oftentimes because they are unable to “attract and retain the talent needed to staff robust security teams, especially when faced with competition by larger FSIs with bigger budget allocations.”

“This challenge is exacerbated by the fact that the larger FSIs, while still a target, are more difficult to hack into than their smaller counterparts,” Hoyt added, “which entices threat actors into targeting the arguably softer, smaller targets without effective cyber control capabilities.”