Asset Visibility in Financial Institutions

Assets Visibility in Financial and Information Services

Financial Institutions (FIS) have always been prime targets for adversaries. These attackers identify hardware assets as the path of least resistance, particularly in cases involving internal threat actors or hardware supply chain attacks. Without proper asset visibility, organizations lack the ability to monitor and secure their connected devices, leaving critical security gaps that increase compliance, audit, and information-security challenges.

The proliferation of connected devices in financial infrastructures further complicates security efforts. As institutions expand their digital ecosystems, maintaining comprehensive asset visibility is essential for detecting rogue devices, enforcing security policies, and mitigating vulnerabilities that could lead to breaches or regulatory penalties.

Why Asset Visibility is Crucial for Regulatory Compliance

Asset visibility is the foundation for addressing these challenges. Clear and comprehensive asset visibility eliminates network blind spots and ensures accurate accounting of every connected asset and its attributes. Without robust asset visibility, Financial Institutions face blind spots and inconsistent policy enforcement, especially due to siloed management of IT, OT, and IoT assets.

Accurate asset visibility ensures financial organizations can:

  • Strengthen incident response and breach prevention strategies.
  • Assess asset risk levels effectively.
  • Enforce security hygiene and compliance policies.
  • Mitigate vulnerabilities associated with hardware-based attacks and phishing schemes.

Challenges with Existing Cyber Security Solutions

Many cybersecurity solutions, such as Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Network Access Control (NAC), and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), fail to provide sufficient asset visibility, leaving financial organizations exposed to hardware-based attacks. These solutions primarily focus on monitoring known threats and enforcing access policies but often lack the ability to detect and identify unauthorized or rogue hardware assets. As a result, attackers exploit these gaps using spoofed network-connected and USB devices, bypassing traditional security measures and undermining regulatory compliance.

Without comprehensive asset visibility and robust firewall protections, financial institutions face an increased risk of malware infections, ransomware attacks, and data breaches. The inability to detect unauthorized hardware assets leads to blind spots in the network, creating security gaps that adversaries can leverage to gain unauthorized access or manipulate critical systems. As cyber threats become more sophisticated, organizations must adopt solutions that provide complete and continuous visibility into all connected assets, ensuring stronger security and regulatory adherence.

True Asset Identity with Sepio

Sepio enhances security by analyzing the physical layer of every asset, generating a unique Asset DNA profile. This advanced approach introduces a new dimension of visibility to an organization’s security management, allowing teams to accurately determine whether an asset is legitimate or rogue. By doing so, Sepio helps close security vulnerabilities and policy gaps that traditional solutions often overlook.

The physical layer analysis includes electrical and functional characteristics, offering agnostic visibility and objective truth—independent of software-based profiling or behavioral assumptions. This ensures that every asset, regardless of its function, operational status, or location, is accurately detected and identified. By eliminating blind spots, Sepio delivers unparalleled reliability in asset visibility and security enforcement.

Asset Visibility with Sepio and Axonius

Sepio and Axonius together empower Financial Institutions (FIS) with a complete and comprehensive asset inventory. Axonius aggregates, normalizes, deduplicates, and correlates data from Sepio and other customer-owned tools to deliver full asset visibility across the entire environment, including Operational Technology (OT) and Information Technology (IT)—all within a single pane of glass. By seamlessly integrating Sepio with Axonius via a simple API key, organizations can efficiently manage all Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) assets under a unified risk framework, ensuring granular policy enforcement and continuous security monitoring.

With this integration, organizations gain deeper insights and contextualized asset-related data, including the detection of previously unidentified rogue assets. These may include passive taps, Human Interface Device (HID) scripting tools, Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks over network and USB, keyloggers, and other covert threats. By offering easy deployment, enhanced visibility, enriched context, and fine-grained policy controls, Sepio and Axonius enable true asset management at scale, strengthening security posture and regulatory compliance.

Complete Asset Visibility for Security and Control

Complete Asset Visibility

Unify external and internal assets visibility for a holistic view of the attack surface. Connecting the Sepio adapter in Axonius gives organizations visibility into all assets. Including OT and loT devices. Alongside over 750 additional data sources on the Axonius platform, Sepio and Axonius deliver a credible and comprehensive inventory of all IT assets, making it easier to identify and mitigate potential security risks across the entire attack surface.

Mitigating Attack Tools

Mitigate hardware based attacks (introduced by internal threat actors or externally – initiated hardware supply chain attacks), removing the so-called path of least resistance. Eliminate the ability for attackers to obtain user credentials through keyloggers. Preventing them from carrying out network/USB MiTM attacks or manipulating the internal hardware modules.

Granular Controls

Enforce specific controls based on organizational preferences. Today’s controls are like a light switch: they’re either all on or all off. With Sepio and Axonius, organizations can set granular level controls based on preferences. Whether it’s for a specific vendor, model, set of users, or specific PCs, organizations now have the flexibility to provide a better employee experience while still protecting the organization.

Sepio & Axonius Benefits

Sepio and Axonius together deliver not only a complete and comprehensive inventory of all assets visibility in your environment, but also deeper insight and contextualization into asset-related data.

  • Protect your private data and prevent breaches caused by malicious hardware attack tools.
  • Enforce granular entitlement at scale. Easily meet regulatory compliance requirements.
  • Better budget and resource planning.
  • Reduce clutter and improve your ESG scores.
Read the Asset Visibility in Financial Institutions Services Brief. (pdf)
November 5th, 2023