The financial services industry processes trillions of dollars every day, making it an ideal target for attackers. In 2024, 97% of US banks experienced a third-party breach, and targeted attacks against the financial industry increased by 109% in 2024 compared to 2023.
These statistics signal a deeper problem that extends far beyond mere coincidence. Financial institutions are routinely targeted by adversaries, including nation-state-backed groups and cybercriminals. Additionally, insider collusion, fraud, and hacktivist groups pose constant threats. When financial organizations are attacked, businesses and individuals lose access to critical financial services.
Not only do these attacks disrupt commerce and daily economic activities, but they are also very costly. The average cost of a breach for financial institutions is $6 million. A breach can also damage brand trust and lead to more regulatory scrutiny, fines, and expensive audits.
Offensive security testing solutions like crowdsourced security can help financial services organizations overcome these challenges. By leveraging human intelligence and SaaS technology, financial services organizations can access specialized expertise on demand to scale their security teams and meet compliance requirements.
Crowdsourced security comes in many forms from bug bounty programs to penetration testing to vulnerability disclosure programs. 96% of ethical hackers agree that they help companies fill their cybersecurity skills gap. For financial services organizations considering crowdsourced security, it can be difficult to know what to expect.
This blog covers 5 ways to be successful with crowdsourcing in the financial services industry to help financial institutions, banks, and fintech companies identify the best solution for them.
In a dream world, financial institutions would hire dynamic, global teams for every security use case. However, this isn’t realistic for most organizations. Crowdsourcing gives you access to a global network of hackers, ready to stress-test your systems on demand in order to find vulnerabilities before attackers do. By tapping into the global community of hackers, you can build the exact team you need.
To do this, you want to be sure you’re working with a vendor that uses data to source and activate hackers with precisely the right skill sets and experience for your programs in order to boost engagement and critical findings–not just “throw bodies” at your problem. This way, you can work with hackers familiar with the unique attack surfaces of the financial services sector.
Separating signal from noise is a key concern for all security teams when either automated tools or humans are involved. Unfortunately, scanners are notoriously noisy, and validating and triaging crowdsourced vulnerability submissions takes a lot of time and skill. With limited security resources and several competing priorities in the financial services industry, work with your crowdsourced security platform to build a program that incentivizes higher-impact vulnerabilities that would be difficult to find using scanners and traditional penetration testing.
If budgeting is a concern, keep in mind that the economic benefits of fair, market-rate payouts for high-impact vulnerabilities far outweigh their cost. Investing in a comprehensive crowdsourced security program can lead to substantial long-term cost savings.
We’ll let you in on a little secret—it is common practice in the crowdsourced security industry for vendors to leave submissions to be handled by third parties. Even worse, many vendors treat triage like an afterthought, leaving vulnerability reports untouched for days or weeks. This slows down remediation, frustrating customers and hackers alike. This is especially risky in the financial services industry, where untouched vulnerabilities can lead to big consequences if threat actors attack.
A good crowdsourced security platform should add critical context to hacker submissions by rapidly validating and triaging bugs, handling the most critical ones within hours. Bugcrowd’s Security Knowledge Graph provides over a decade of rich data to add context for faster triage and remediation. Look for platforms with an SLO success rate of 95%+ for handling critical vulnerabilities, dedicated sta for niche specializations such as mobile and IoT, and real-time visibility into security decision-making and results.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks financial services organizations hit when implementing crowdsourced security is the infamous “program ceiling.” The lack of human attention to detail causes programs to decline or plateau.
Hitting this ceiling doesn’t have to be inevitable. Through reporting and analytics, organizations can continuously improve their programs. A good crowdsourced security platform should provide multiple ways of visualizing data and metrics for your programs, making it easy to monitor program health, benchmark against key metrics, and make actionable improvements.
A good security strategy at a financial services organization cannot exist in a vacuum—it must be part of a broader workflow that extends across DevOps tools and the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Don’t forget that today’s software development lifecycle practices emphasize continual release of new codebase versions. This means that even if an asset is secure immediately following a test, new code releases could leave it vulnerable to attack until the next scheduled test.
Chances are, your bank, fintech company, or financial services institution doesn’t have the resources or desire to build the necessary integrations from scratch, so we recommend looking for vendors who offer the following:
Download the Ultimate Guide for Offensive Security for Financial Services Organizations to learn more about elevating proactive security, specific to the industry.