Singapore – Recent breach incidents in the last year dropped by nearly half, from 29% in 2021 to 14% in 2024, according to the latest research from Thales, an IT services and consulting firm.
Despite the decline, 39% of financial services firms have still been breached, which is 10 percentage points lower than the overall DTR survey figure of 49%.
Planning further remains inadequate, with only one in four FinServ respondents stating they would follow a formal plan in the event of an attack. This was noted to have 5 percentage points higher than all respondents.
The report also found that ransomware response remains a challenge, with 18% of the respondents reporting that they have experienced an attack as ransomware incidents continue to rise.
Only 25% have also stated having a ransomware response plan despite regulations requiring them. Additionally, of those who have dealt with past ransomware attacks, 5% paid a ransom, and 9% stated they would consider paying to resolve a future attack.
Moreover, GenAI’s speed of adoption and fast-moving ecosystem have emerged as a significant security concern, with 27% of organisations planning to incorporate AI into their core products and services in the next 12 months. This was recorded 5 percentage points higher than overall respondents.
Approximately 73% of FinServ also cited the rapid changes that challenge existing GenAI plans, yet 71% shared that they are in the integration or enablement phases of production deployments beyond experimentation or exploration phases.
FinServ organisations further continue to struggle with human error and zero-day vulnerabilities at rates higher than the overall population, while investments in MFA and meeting industry and government compliance requirements are clearly helping.
Apart from these issues, the report further highlighted cloud security and DevSecOps as top challenges, revealing 43% of FinServ respondents stated that data stored in the cloud is sensitive, reaffirming that these organisations are clearly moving critical workloads to the cloud.
The percentage of FinServ organisations using more than one hyperscaler (IaaS) also increased from 54% in 2022 to 73% in 2024, and FinServ enterprises that agree or strongly agree that
Meanwhile, respondents also said managing security in the cloud is more complex than managing security on-premises, which has increased 20 percentage points since 2022.
Interestingly, human error was also among the leading causes of cloud-based data breaches at 41%.
Exploitation of previously unknown vulnerabilities and failure to apply multifactor authentication (MFA) to privileged accounts were further included as two other major causes.
Operational complexity remains a security concern, with 49% of FinServ respondents reporting they use five or more key management systems.Among respondents who cited cloud/DevSecOps security as an emerging security concern, the greatest proportion cited secrets management as a top DevOps challenge.
In addition, of the FinServ respondents whose organisations failed a compliance audit in the last 12 months, 80% stated having experienced some breach in their history. In contrast, for those FinServ organisations that have not failed a compliance audit, only 15% have any breach history, with just 3% having a breach in the last 12 months.
Lastly, it was also noted that future compromise of classical encryption techniques that enable “harvest now, decrypt later” (HNDL) attacks is leading interest in post-quantum cryptography (72%). In particular, among FinServ respondents who identified post-quantum cryptography as an emerging security threat, 30% indicated they would likely create resilience contingency plans, while 48% said they would prototype or evaluate PQC algorithms in the next 18–24 months.
Erick Reyes, ANZ Director, data security at Thales, said, “A mix of sensitive, high-value data and robust compliance regulations mean financial service organisations across ANZ tend to be further advanced than other sectors when it comes to security and overall cybersecurity. While compliance mandates remain one of the industry’s biggest challenges, our research indicates that compliance achievements drive better security outcomes, leading to fewer breaches.
He further continued, “As more regulations such as APRA’s CPS 230 come into effect within the next year, finserv organisations must remain proactive, in control, and on top of both government and industry requirements.”
“What is concerning when we look at new threats coming from technologies such as generative AI and even quantum computing is an overall lack of preparedness. Three in four organisations globally do not yet have a formal plan in place should they fall victim to a ransomware attack. Others continue to struggle with the complexities of securing their assets in the cloud, as well as integrating security within their development and operational processes,” added Reyes.
“In environments where critical workloads are being hosted and IT and OT is continuing to converge, cybersecurity strategies that focus on comprehensive DevSecOps programs, strong cloud security, and access management are key to tackling a fast-growing and sophisticated threat landscape,” he concluded.
