Finance & Insurance

Two pressures at once

Financial services and insurance firms carry a regulatory load that most organizations of the same size do not. A forty-person registered advisor answers to written information security requirements that a forty-person manufacturer never sees. The obligations arrive from several directions at once — the FTC Safeguards Rule, state insurance data security laws, PCI DSS where cards are handled, SOC 2 because clients and counterparties ask for the report — and each one wants evidence rather than assurances.

At the same time, this is the sector attackers work hardest. Not because the networks are weaker, but because the payoff is immediate: funds that can be moved, account credentials that convert directly to money, and customer data with a standing resale market. Business email compromise and wire fraud attempts are a constant background condition in this industry, not an occasional event.

The result is a familiar squeeze. Compliance work consumes the security budget, the controls get built to satisfy a questionnaire, and the estate ends up documented rather than defended. Those are not the same thing, and an examiner is increasingly able to tell the difference.

Where we focus

Segmentation around regulated data

Establishing real boundaries around the systems that hold cardholder data, customer financial records and policyholder information — with enforcement between zones, not merely VLANs that route freely to one another. Where PCI DSS applies, well-drawn segmentation is also the single most effective way to reduce what falls inside scope, which lowers both the assessment burden and the ongoing cost of carrying it.

Access control and identity

Access built around verified identity and device posture rather than network location, with multi-factor authentication on the paths that matter and privileged access separated from day-to-day accounts. Most of the technical safeguards these frameworks ask for reduce, in practice, to knowing who reached what and being able to prove it. See Zero Trust Architecture for how that is structured.

Perimeter, email and the wire-fraud path

Firewall architecture and egress control at the boundary, alongside hardening of the mailflow and identity path that business email compromise depends on. Wire fraud is usually not a network intrusion at all — it is an authenticated user acting on a convincing instruction. The controls that help are the ones that make account takeover difficult and unusual access visible.

Branch, remote and third-party connectivity

Multi-site firms, remote advisors and home offices all need consistent enforcement rather than a weaker version of the head-office design. The same applies to the vendor connections this industry runs on — custodians, clearing firms, core banking and policy administration platforms, managed service providers. Each is a standing third-party route in, and each should be brokered, scoped and revocable.

Logging and audit evidence

Retention and monitoring configured so the estate can answer the questions an examination actually asks: who had access, what changed, when, and who approved it. Firms are rarely short of logs. They are short of logs that were collected deliberately, kept long enough, and can be produced without a two-week reconstruction exercise.

Continuity and recovery

Resilience where an outage stops transactions or breaches a service commitment to a client, and recovery paths that have been tested rather than documented. Several frameworks in this sector now ask specifically whether the recovery plan has been exercised — a question that has ended more than one otherwise clean review.

How we engage

The same three phases as the rest of our work. Start at any of them; many firms come to us with an examination finding, a client questionnaire they cannot answer, or a SOC 2 readiness effort already underway.

On compliance

We build and operate the technical controls these frameworks call for, and we produce the evidence — configurations, access records, logs, network documentation — that an assessment or examination asks for. What we do not do is assess you. We are not a QSA and do not issue attestations, opinions or reports of compliance; where an independent assessor or auditor is required, we work alongside them and give them what they need.

PCI DSS, SOC 2, the FTC Safeguards Rule, GLBA and the state insurance data security laws overlap heavily at the technical layer. Built once and built properly, the same segmentation, access control and logging work satisfies most of what each of them asks for. See Compliance & Risk for how the assessment and readiness work is structured.

Who this is for

• Community banks and credit unions carrying examination requirements without a large internal security team behind them.
• Registered investment advisors, wealth managers and broker-dealers facing written information security program obligations and client due-diligence questionnaires.
• Insurance carriers, agencies and brokers subject to state data security laws and holding policyholder data across multiple systems.
• Accounting, tax and financial services firms handling client financial records under the FTC Safeguards Rule.
• Any firm that has been asked for a SOC 2 report, or is scoping one, and needs the underlying controls built before readiness work begins.