It’s not easy for a bank to protect itself against cyber crime. And it’s much harder when there are hackers who make it their mission to take the bank down. To win, the bank needs some seriously strong security.
In 2012, Spain’s economy was in deep recession. The European Union came to the rescue with more than US$100 billion. But there were conditions: one of them—Spain had to set up a “bad bank,” a bank that would help restore the health of the nation’s ailing private banks by taking on their soured real estate assets.
So Spain set up Sareb—and Sareb set out on its mission of absorbing toxic real estate loans and properties from banks on the brink of failure because of collapsing property prices. Sareb took on almost 200,000 assets worth more than US$54 billion. Next step: Triage the assets and sell the salvageable ones back into the market.
All good, right? Not quite. Some Spanish citizens were angry at the bailout of failing banks. And hackers, always on the lookout for a target, put Sareb in their crosshairs. They launched a major zero-day attack and a CryptoLocker ransomware attack. They even created a malicious app called Sareb Go (after Pokemon Go), in which hackers tried to take Sareb assets by force.
Sareb had almost no security shield—no firewalls, no data-loss prevention, no threat protection. It needed a strong security infrastructure—and because it was on a strict schedule to liquidate assets, it needed it fast.
So Sareb went straight to the top. It called on Symantec and implementation partner Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and together they deployed a bulletproof solution for endpoint and email gateways.
Mission accomplished. Sareb can now uncover and investigate any suspicious events, search for particular indicators of compromise, get deep threat visibility, and remediate every attack artifact across all endpoints.
And Sareb can always call on Symantec and HPE experts for help. “You can own a Ferrari and it’s a great car,” says Gabriel Moline, corporate security manager at Sareb. “But if you don’t know how to drive it properly, what’s the use of having it? With Symantec and HPE, I have a high-end race car that I can expertly drive.”
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