Contextual Risk Mangement

Mar 17

Large Banks’ Cyber Risks and How Wiz Can Mitigate Them

Most large financial institutions, like JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, face several significant cyber risks that the Wiz approach could help mitigate. Let's analyze these risks and how Wiz's cloud security platform might address them:

Tier 1 Financial Services - Biggest Cyber Risks

1. Cloud Infrastructure Complexity

Tier 1 banks have been migrating to cloud platforms while maintaining legacy systems, creating a complex hybrid environment that's difficult to secure uniformly.

2. Identity and Access Management Challenges

With thousands of employees, contractors, and service accounts, managing access privileges and preventing privilege escalation is extremely challenging.

3. Third-Party/Supply Chain Risk

Banks rely on hundreds of third-party vendors and financial technology partners that could introduce vulnerabilities outside their direct control.

4. Application Security Gaps

As large banks rapidly develops digital services, security vulnerabilities in applications could expose customer data or financial systems.

5. Regulatory Compliance Burden

Financial institutions face stringent compliance requirements (GLBA, PCI DSS, SOX) with severe penalties for violations.

How Wiz's Approach Would Help Mitigate These Risks

For Cloud Infrastructure Complexity

Unified Visibility: Wiz would provide a single, comprehensive view across banks' multi-cloud and hybrid environments
Automated Discovery: Continuously identify shadow IT and unmanaged resources that traditional tools might miss
Security Graph: Map relationships between resources to understand blast radius and attack paths that cross cloud boundaries

For Identity and Access Management

Identity Risk Analysis: Wiz would identify excessive permissions, toxic permission combinations, and unnecessary access paths
Lateral Movement Detection: Highlight potential lateral movement paths that could allow privilege escalation
Effective Permissions View: Show actual permissions rather than just assigned roles, uncovering hidden access paths

For Third-Party/Supply Chain Risk

API Connectivity Analysis: Map connections between bank's systems and third-party services
Workload-to-Internet Exposure: Identify inappropriate external connections that create risk
Runtime Security: Detect unusual behavior in third-party components that might indicate compromise

For Application Security

Infrastructure-as-Code Scanning: Find security issues before deployment
Vulnerability Context: Prioritize vulnerabilities based on actual exposure rather than just CVSS scores
Secrets Detection: Identify hardcoded credentials and API keys in applications

For Regulatory Compliance

Compliance Frameworks: Automatically map security findings to specific regulatory requirements
Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Real-time visibility into compliance status rather than point-in-time assessments
Evidence Collection: Automated documentation for auditors without manual effort

The Wiz approach would be particularly valuable for Bank of America because it provides contextual risk analysis across their entire environment, focusing security teams on the highest priority issues rather than drowning them in alerts from multiple disconnected security tools. This is especially important given their complex regulatory environment and the high value of their data assets.

Jennifer Lin