Retail Banking: Portal Protection

In the world of retail banking, competition is fierce not only from the traditional high street, but also new challenger banks and the technology giants.

Business Challenge

Improving Experience and Interaction

To be competitive, this retail bank needed to offer an online portal where customers could apply for a mortgage using a process that was fast, simple, easy to use – but that did not offer a potential point of ingress for cybercriminals.

In particular, the bank needed to find a way to ensure documents and images submitted to the portal couldn’t be used to introduce malware.

The bank chose Deep Secure Threat Removal for Web Gateways alongside their Web Application Firewall to ensure their portal couldn’t be used as a “backdoor” into the network by cyber criminals.

In particular, the bank needed to find a way to ensure documents and images submitted to the portal couldn’t be used to introduce malware.

Solution

Threat Removal for Web Gateways

The bank chose Deep Secure Threat Removal for Web Gateways alongside their Web Application Firewall to ensure their portal couldn’t be used as a “backdoor” into the network by cyber criminals.

For the bank’s security team, document uploads represent a particular concern. Overwhelmingly, malware designed to compromise networks and steal assets is initially introduced by being concealed in innocent-looking documents. Documents that can then be uploaded via a portal.

This “zero-day” malware routinely evades detection by conventional anti-virus products, so the team needed to find a better solution – one that would guarantee any document or image uploaded via the portal was totally threat-free and would not give the cybercriminals a way into the network.

“The challenge was to offer an unbeatable level of experience and interaction via the portal, without compromising security.”

Instead of relying on detection-based anti-virus, the bank installed Deep Secure Threat Removal for Web Gateways alongside its Web Application Firewall (WAF) to protect the portal.

The WAF acts as both an application firewall and a reverse proxy passing any document or image it receives via the portal to Deep Secure Threat Removal for Web Gateways.

Using a unique process called transformation, the valid business content is extracted from the uploaded document, the original is discarded, and a brand-new document or image is created and handed back to the WAF.

Using this approach, the bank has strengthened its security posture. Every upload is transformed and guaranteed 100% threat-free of both known and unknown or “zero-day” malware.

“GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) recommends the use of transformation technology to counter zero-day malware. We followed this recommendation and deployed Deep Secure Threat Removal for Web Gateways to transform every document uploaded via the portal, ensuring every file we receive is completely threat-free.”

Results

Faster, Better Home Buying Experiences

Deep Secure Threat Removal for Web Gateways is a key component in the cybersecurity platform deployed by the bank. It underpins faster, better home-buying experiences for customers together with improved operational efficiencies and cost savings for the bank.

The transformation process is transparent to both the applicant and the bank employee. It is appreciably quicker than the alternative – and inferior – anti-virus scan. Uploaded documents are complete, fully editable, pixel perfect and 100% threat-free.

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