Finance and Payments
The Finance & Payments sector, in the context of cybersecurity, deals with the movement and storage of money and financial data. Due to the high value of assets and the highly regulated nature of the industry, cybersecurity here is defined by stringent compliance standards and the need to thwart financially motivated attacks. Security is focused on transaction integrity, data encryption, and fraud prevention.
Payment Gateways & Processors
This category includes the technology and services that authorize and process credit card or direct bank payments for merchants and financial institutions. They are the critical intermediary between the customer, the merchant, and the bank.
Examples: Third-party payment providers (e.g., Stripe, PayPal), internal payment gateways, and merchant processing services.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Transaction Integrity and PCI DSS Compliance. The main goal is to secure the Cardholder Data Environment (CDE)—the technology and people that interact with payment card data—to prevent theft and ensure all regulatory requirements are met.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Magecart (Web Skimming) Attacks: The most common e-commerce threat, where attackers compromise a processor's front-end or a merchant's checkout page by injecting malicious JavaScript. This code intercepts cardholder data as the customer types it, before it is securely encrypted and sent to the processor.
API Exploitation: Payment processors expose APIs to merchants to facilitate transactions. Insecure API keys, lack of rate limiting, or flaws in the API logic can be exploited to generate fraudulent transactions or retrieve sensitive customer data.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF): Exploiting a lack of proper security validation on the payment form, allowing an attacker to force a user to execute unintended actions, such as making a purchase or changing account settings.
Supply Chain Risk: A vulnerability in the third-party payment gateway that is used by thousands of merchants leads to a massive, systemic data breach across multiple organizations simultaneously.
Financial & Accounting Software
This category includes the applications used for managing a company's financial records, internal auditing, payroll, budgeting, and core ledger functions.
Examples: Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems (e.g., SAP, Oracle Financials), specialized accounting packages (e.g., QuickBooks Enterprise), and internal ledger systems.
Cybersecurity Focus:
Data Integrity and Fraud Prevention. The focus is on preventing unauthorized modification of financial records, blocking internal and external fraud attempts, and maintaining an unalterable audit trail.
Specific Cybersecurity Risks:
Business Logic Flaws: Exploiting errors in the application's internal financial rules (e.g., a flaw allowing duplicate payments or incorrect inventory counts) to manipulate financial statements or commit fraud.
Internal Fraud/Insider Threats: Employees with legitimate access abusing privileges to alter payroll, change vendor bank account details, or conceal theft within the accounting records.
Ransomware and System Disruption: Targeting the core accounting database (often an ERP system) because the Availability of the financial data is mission-critical. A successful attack can halt all financial operations until a ransom is paid.
Credential Theft for Lateral Movement: Compromising an accounting staff member's credentials through phishing to gain access to the financial system, then using that access to pivot to the broader network or payment processing environments.
ThreatNG provides essential external visibility to secure the highly sensitive Finance & Payments sector by identifying exposed assets, misconfigurations, and leaked credentials that attackers would use to facilitate fraud, data theft, and non-compliance, particularly concerning the PCI DSS environment.
ThreatNG’s External Discovery and Continuous Monitoring
ThreatNG performs purely external unauthenticated discovery to map the public-facing components of the payment ecosystem, which are typically the weak points targeted in attacks like Magecart.
Technology Stack Discovery: ThreatNG identifies the external presence of specific technologies relevant to this sector. It specifically lists the discovery of Point of Sale (POS) / Retail Management and Ecommerce technologies, directly addressing both retail and online payment risks.
Continuous Monitoring: Financial systems and payment APIs are constantly updated or changed. ThreatNG provides constant monitoring of all discovered domains and subdomains. If an external developer instance of a Payment Gateway is accidentally left public, or if a legacy payment API endpoint is exposed, ThreatNG detects the configuration change immediately, preventing sustained exposure that could lead to an API Exploitation or data breach.
Code Secret Exposure Discovery: This is a vital check for securing Payment Gateways and financial APIs. ThreatNG investigates public code repositories for hard-coded sensitive data.
Example: ThreatNG finds a public code repository containing a valid, non-expired Stripe API Key, AWS S3 access credentials for a payment log storage bucket, or an internal account credential for a Financial & Accounting Software system. This immediate exposure is a direct path to API Exploitation or Credential Theft for Lateral Movement.
External Assessment Capabilities
ThreatNG’s External Assessment assigns scores that quantify the financial and reputational risk associated with external exposure.
Web Application Hijack Susceptibility: This score is essential for Payment Gateways and e-commerce platforms. The assessment analyzes the front-end to find flaws that can be exploited for Web Skimming (Magecart Attacks).
Example: A high score would be triggered if the assessment detects outdated JavaScript libraries or a misconfigured Content Security Policy (CSP) on the payment checkout page, confirming susceptibility to code injection that allows an attacker to intercept cardholder data before it reaches the secure processor.
Data Leak Susceptibility: This score is derived from Cloud and SaaS Exposure and Dark Web Presence and directly addresses the core data breach risk.
Example: A high score flags that administrative credentials for the organization's Financial & Accounting Software (like an ERP system login) have been found in DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials). This is a direct precursor to Internal Fraud/Insider Threats or a significant data breach of financial records.
Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility: This score addresses threats to the Availability of the core systems.
Example: The assessment identifies an exposed, unpatched database port on a server hosting the organization’s Financial & Accounting Software. This entry point is a direct path for attackers to deploy Ransomware and System Disruption to the mission-critical ledger.
Investigation Modules and Technology Identification
ThreatNG’s Investigation Modules provide the granular evidence needed to track and remediate specific security weaknesses in payment infrastructure.
Technology Identification: This identifies specific financial software in use externally.
Example: ThreatNG identifies the external login portals for specific ERP systems (like SAP or Oracle Financials) or payment processor APIs. This allows the security team to correlate the asset with known CVEs from DarCache Vulnerability data, ensuring the most public and critical financial portals are patched first.
Search Engine Exploitation: This module searches for inadvertently indexed data that could compromise financial systems.
Example: The module detects that a search engine has indexed a development folder containing temporary log files from a Payment Gateway that were accidentally made public, revealing unencrypted PII or transaction details.
Archived Web Pages: This feature helps secure forgotten portals and legacy payment systems.
Example: ThreatNG discovers an archived login page for a legacy merchant portal that is still functional but running outdated software with a known vulnerability, which an attacker could use to pivot into the main payment environment.
Intelligence Repositories (DarCache)
The Intelligence Repositories provide the crucial threat context regarding credentials, vulnerabilities, and targeted attacks against the financial sector.
DarCache Rupture (Compromised Credentials): This directly addresses Credential Theft for Lateral Movement and API Exploitation. It alerts the organization if administrative credentials for Payment Gateways or core Financial & Accounting Software are found on the Dark Web, enabling an immediate forced password reset.
DarCache Vulnerability (NVD, EPSS, KEV, eXploit): This ensures that the organization focuses on fixing vulnerabilities that are actively being used against the financial sector.
Example: If a component used by the Payment Gateway (e.g., a specific web server version) is found to have a vulnerability listed on the KEV (Known Exploited Vulnerabilities) list, DarCache prioritizes this finding as critical, preventing exploitation that could lead to a Supply Chain Risk or data breach.
DarCache Ransomware: Tracks ransomware gangs and associated activity, providing vital context for the Breach & Ransomware Susceptibility score, informing the organization of the current threat landscape targeting their sector.
Complementary Solutions
ThreatNG's external focus creates powerful synergies when combined with internal security and compliance tools:
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) / Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR): ThreatNG’s high-fidelity alerts on compromised credentials (from DarCache Rupture) or exposed payment APIs are ingested by SIEM/SOAR systems. This intelligence is used to trigger an immediate, automated quarantine of the affected user's account or to block all traffic to the exposed Payment Gateway API, mitigating fraud risk faster than manual processes.
Web Application Firewalls (WAF) / Content Delivery Networks (CDN): ThreatNG’s detailed Web Application Hijack Susceptibility assessment, which finds weaknesses exploitable by Magecart or other injection attacks, provides actionable intelligence. This intelligence can be delivered to the WAF/CDN to tune security rules and block specific malicious traffic patterns on the e-commerce checkout page, preventing card skimming.
Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) Tools: ThreatNG’s External GRC Assessment provides continuous, outside-in evaluation, mapping findings to regulatory frameworks like PCI DSS. The external evidence of exposed data, weak ciphers, or unpatched payment systems is fed directly into the GRC tool, providing audit teams with objective evidence of non-compliance issues that need immediate attention.
