21 Cybersecurity Statistics For UK Financial Services Organisations

Written by Sabrina McClune | 25 10 22

Cybercrime is one of the biggest risks facing financial institutions today. While the rapid digitisation of the industry has expanded the scope for efficiency, customer service, and growth for financial organisations, it has also introduced a range of new opportunities for bad actors to exploit.

Accordingly, cybersecurity is now a key risk factor, to be considered at the same level as financial and other operational issues.

To safeguard customer data and capital, as well as protect their own systems, financial institutions are now in a race with criminals to increase security, control, and transparency.

However, in this fast-changing market, it’s easy to fall behind.

To help you keep up, we've collated the top 21 statistics to help you understand the state of UK cybersecurity, the key risks, and the potential solutions.

Understanding The Risk

1. Financial services organisations are 300 times more likely than other companies to be targeted by a cyberattack.

2. After the pandemic, the number of cyber-attacks rose by over 200%.

3. The banking industry has experienced a 1318% increase in ransomware attacks in the last few years.

4. Cybersecurity risk is rated “extremely important” by more than 80% of bankers as the top internal risk, more than double any other category of operational risk.

Quantifying The Threat

5. The average cost of cybercrime for financial services is 40% higher.

6. Nearly 39% of financial institutions that experienced ransomware attacks paid a ransom of $1 million.

7. The average cost of a data breach in the financial sector is $5.9 million, which is above the global average cost of a data breach across all studied industries at $4.45 million

8. The average time to remedy a security issue for 37% of institutions is over three months.

Key Threats: Phishing

9. HMRC reported a 73% increase in phishing attacks.

10. Financial services is the most impersonated industry for phishing, accounting for 34% of activity.

11. Attackers use the phishing technique to gain initial access in 46% of attacks against the financial services sector.

Key Threats: Ransomware

12. The banking/financial sector accounts for 22% of total ransomware attacks.

13. The financial services sector has seen a 64% increase in ransomware, with 81% of these attacks resulting in data encryption.

14. In a survey of financial leaders, 74% of respondents have experienced one or more ransomware attacks, while 63% of those victims ultimately had to pay the ransom.

Key Threats: System Attacks

15. Threat actors use vulnerability exploitation attacks as the initial access vector in one in three attacks against financial institutions.

16. DDoS attacks have increased by 110% in comparison to previous years in the financial services sector.

Attitudes To Cybersecurity

17. 95% of board committees discuss cyber risks four times or more a year.

18. Top investment priorities for CISOs include Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (24%), Workload Security (22%), Mobile Security (21%), Threat Intelligence (15%), and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (11%).

How Are Firms Addressing Risk?

19. Financial firms who've mastered cybersecurity are nearly four times better at stopping breaches.

20. For leading financial firms, modern systems and security protocols can reduce the cost of a breach by as much as 72 percent, saving $273,000 per breach.

21. At an average of 22 incidents per year, these savings add up to potentially $6 million annually for the average firm.

Preparing Your Business

Keeping up with the rapid changes taking place in the cybersecurity landscape while maintaining service levels and core systems is one of the chief challenges for financial providers, platforms, and intermediaries.

Mailock is a tailor-made secure email solution for financial services businesses, allowing providers, advisers, and customers to communicate securely using a single system.

In a click, you can exchange files quickly and securely with advisers, clients, and customers, minimising the need for paper and protecting against interception and fraud.