Cyber Security for Accountancy, Brokerage and Financial Firms
Financial firms are targeted for the money that moves through them and the data they hold about clients. Both need protecting, and the controls are different for each.
What cyber security do small financial firms need?
Client money and client data drive the requirement. FCA-regulated firms must manage operational resilience and report material cyber incidents; all firms handling client financial data face UK GDPR duties. In practice the priorities are payment fraud controls, email security, access management and recoverable backups.
Business email compromise is the main event
For financial firms, the most likely serious incident is not ransomware. It is business email compromise — an attacker gaining access to a mailbox, watching quietly for weeks, and then intercepting or redirecting a payment at exactly the right moment. By the time anyone notices, the money has moved through several accounts.
The technical defences are MFA, blocking legacy authentication, alerting on mailbox forwarding rules, and DMARC enforcement so your domain cannot be spoofed. The process defence is simpler and more effective: never change bank details on the strength of an email, and verify every change by calling a number you already held, not one in the message.
- MFA across all mailboxes with legacy authentication blocked
- Alerting on new mailbox rules and external forwarding
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured to enforcement, not just monitoring
- Out-of-band verification mandated for any bank detail change
- Dual authorisation above a defined payment threshold
- Finance team briefed specifically on impersonation and urgency tactics
Client data and confidentiality
Accountancy practices, brokers and advisers hold an unusually complete picture of their clients: identity documents, bank details, income, assets, sometimes health information for protection products. A breach is therefore both a UK GDPR matter and a direct threat to the client relationships the firm depends on.
We focus on where that data actually sits — which is usually not where the firm thinks. It is in mailboxes, in a shared drive with permissions nobody has reviewed since it was created, in a portal, and on a partner's laptop.
- Data mapping — where client data actually lives, including in mailboxes
- Shared drive and portal permission review
- Encryption on all laptops and mobile devices
- Retention rules so you are not holding identity documents indefinitely
- Secure client file exchange to replace emailed attachments
Operational resilience for FCA-regulated firms
FCA-regulated firms are expected to identify their important business services, set impact tolerances, and be able to remain within them during disruption — including cyber disruption. Material incidents are reportable to the FCA, and the expectation is that firms can evidence they thought about this in advance.
For a small firm this does not need to be a heavyweight programme. It needs a documented understanding of which services must keep running, what depends on them, how long you could tolerate an outage, and a tested plan for the most likely scenarios. We help produce that in proportionate form.
Included in every engagement
Fixed scope, agreed in writing before we start. If the scope changes, we stop and re-quote rather than invoicing the difference.
Financial Services Security — your questions answered
A client says their bank details changed by email. What should we do?
Do we have to report a cyber incident to the FCA?
Is Cyber Essentials enough for a financial services firm?
What is DMARC and do we need it?
Question not answered here? Call +44 7424 967568 or email support@cipherknights.com.
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Ready to talk about financial services security?
Book a free, no-obligation consultation with our Leicester team, or call us and we will point you in the right direction whether or not you become a client.