Financial trading floors can be crazy places. While a lot has changed since the 1980s, when throngs of white-shirted men (almost exclusively men) shouted out largely incomprehensible instructions of what to buy and sell while holding chunky phones to their ears, the pace of financial trading is no less hectic.
If anything, it’s even faster today, largely thanks to advancements in computers. Countless trades happen every second now, and each involves a mountain of data, much of which is quite sensitive. How on earth can financial institutions keep their systems and workstations safe from potential threats and unauthorized changes without slowing them down and impeding their operations?
Faronics Deep Freeze can help. In this article, we’ll go over how Deep Freeze can ensure the reliability and security of trading floor workstations by reverting systems to a pristine state after each session, minimizing downtime and safeguarding sensitive data.
What Is a Financial Trading Floor?
A trading floor is a place where the trading of financial instruments takes place. Trades can involve equities, futures and options. Various exchanges, such as the New York Stock Exchange or Chicago Board of Trade, house trading floors. Trading floors may also be hubs of activity within financial firms, such as investment banks and hedge funds.
Today, physical trading floors have faded in prominence. Computer screens, electronic markets and algorithmic trading have largely superseded the trading floor in importance to the financial sector. However, whether your organization trades in physical spaces, electronically or both, there are numerous security and reliability concerns you should address.
What Are the Security Challenges Involved With Trading?
Security is extremely important in the financial sector. There are myriad threats to the stability and safety of financial trades, including:
Data Breaches
Data breaches and leaks are a paramount concern in financial trading because of the highly sensitive nature of the information involved. These incidents, which can result from phishing, malware or system vulnerabilities, can expose vast quantities of confidential client data, including personal identification, account details and transaction histories.
Breach repercussions extend beyond immediate financial losses. A breach can result in severe reputational damage, regulatory fines and a significant erosion of trust from clients and the broader market.
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
DDoS attacks threaten the availability and functionality of financial trading platforms. By overwhelming systems with a flood of malicious traffic, DDoS attacks can render trading websites and networks inaccessible, preventing legitimate users from executing trades, accessing critical market data or managing their portfolios. Such disruptions can lead to substantial financial losses for individuals and institutions and undermine market stability writ large.
Insider Threats
Insider threats are a particularly insidious challenge in financial trading. Staff with authorized access to an organization’s systems and sensitive data can wreak havoc under the wrong circumstances. Sometimes this results from a deliberate malicious attack, possibly motivated by personal gain or grievances, leading to data theft, fraud or sabotage.
However, honest mistakes can be just as damaging. Unintentional changes can occur because of negligence, human error, or susceptibility to social engineering tactics, such as phishing.
Market Manipulation
Market manipulation involves intentionally interfering with the free and fair operation of financial markets to create an artificial advantage. This can involve spreading false information to influence stock prices or using automated bots to generate fake trading activity to deceive other investors. This can severely distort market integrity, harm unsuspecting investors and erode overall confidence in the financial system.
Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware attacks are a significant threat to financial institutions involved in trading. These attacks involve encrypting critical data and systems, rendering them unusable, and demanding a ransom payment to decrypt them.
Beyond the direct financial cost of the ransom itself, organizations face severe operational disruptions, potential data exfiltration (known as double or triple extortion), and lengthy recovery periods. All these can lead to substantial financial losses, regulatory penalties and a profound effect on customer trust and business continuity.
What Is Reboot to Restore?
At Faronics, we innovated Deep Freeze to make workstations indestructible. The solution offers several security features, but the crown jewel is its Reboot to Restore technology.
What if you could erase any security issue with the push of a button? Reboot to Restore enables you to do just this. Every time you turn off a workstation, it reboots to a predetermined safe state. Any unauthorized changes that occurred during the previous session disappear, so you don’t have to worry about what may have happened. Combine this with other features, such as partitions and password protection, and you can trade confidently.
Reach out to our experts today to learn more about how Deep Freeze can protect your financial processes.
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