And although most of the fraudulent transactions were blocked, $101 million vanished without a trace. This event sent shockwaves through the financial world and exposed just how underestimated systemic cyber risks in the financial system had become.

This underscored a pressing reality: modern financial institutions must proactively guard against sophisticated cyber threats. And as Cyber threats in the financial sector become more sophisticated and frequent, safeguarding both user data and institutional digital assets is a top priority.

This is where Virtual Chief Information Security Officer (vCISO) services become not only relevant but essential.

The term “financial institutions” encompasses a wide array of businesses within the financial services industry, from traditional banking and investment firms to financial advisors and fintech companies.

This article focuses specifically on financial institutions that manage sensitive client data or conduct high-volume financial transactions—organizations where cybersecurity isn’t just a regulatory requirement, but a business imperative.

For these institutions, cybersecurity risk management strategies are fundamentally built around three core pillars:

• Ensuring availability of financial systems
• Maintaining the privacy of client and vendor financial data
• Protecting the confidentiality of proprietary investment and trading platforms

A Virtual Chief Information Security Officers (vCISOs) in this case, provides critical value.

Financial institutions often have unique cybersecurity demands. Larger banks might employ internal cybersecurity teams, but many mid-sized firms—such as investment platforms and wealth management services—leverage vCISOs to enhance their cyber posture without the full-time expense.

A virtual CISO brings specialized expertise, providing leadership across a spectrum of cybersecurity initiatives, ensuring that technical and regulatory requirements are not only met but strategically aligned with business goals. These experts help financial organizations reduce risk, meet compliance mandates, and stay resilient in the face of today’s sophisticated threats.

That requires participation of the cybersecurity team in conjunction with other risk stakeholders in the business to comply with and complete documentation and questionnaires and attestations to ensure that proper regulatory approval is given to that financial institution.

Financial institution can also benefit from a virtual CISO through specific financial systems and platforms that institution uses. Usually this means third-party applications or internally hosted applications that have some type of financial impact. They are usually integrated with other systems.

vCISO’s serve as a bridge between cybersecurity teams and executive stakeholders, ensuring that technical controls support regulatory readiness.

This means that whenever the institution has the clients externally accessing financial information, they’re typically going to do that through an application. That application is typically available on the internet as what we call a SaaS platform or a hosted application.

In summary, Virtual CISOs help implement:

• Robust VLAN configurations
• Network Access Control (NAC) policies
• Role-based access to limit lateral movement within networks

Proper segmentation ensures that even if one system is compromised, attackers cannot pivot easily across environments.

At Asher Security we ensure that we segregate those systems from other internal systems which we call infrastructure systems so that even a breach within those systems would not correlate to a companywide breach.

Take for example, a Salesforce, they have a recommended best practice cybersecurity list that should be implemented by a cybersecurity professional working with the Salesforce administrator. That cybersecurity practice should be added to an ongoing governance list so that those controls can be checked on a regular basis. A virtual CISO can help a financial institution align with the security frameworks.

The financial institutions will typically still try to measure their cybersecurity maturity they historically don’t want another cybersecurity certification or attestation unless they’re primarily client focused.

Sometimes they can outsource those other cybersecurity attestations, but from an internal standpoint, they still want to measure their cybersecurity without getting a certification or attestation. You’re going to want to pick a cybersecurity framework that is universal and measurable and trackable.

You want to take the very wide and very deep requirements of cybersecurity and organize them in a way that they can be prioritized, documented and tracked no matter who that cybersecurity resource is and ensure that someone that comes into that role in the future can pick right up, maintain what’s previously been done with backsliding or deterioration of the cybersecurity program through the transition of cybersecurity resources.

Explore our Virtual CISO Services to strengthen your institution’s cybersecurity posture.