THREAT-WATCHFINANCIAL SERVICES
Cybersecurity for Financial Services
Banking and financial market infrastructure sit at the core of NIS2's essential-entity scope, with fraud and data-integrity risk layered on top.
Why this sector is different
Banking and financial market infrastructure are named essential-entity sectors under NIS2, with DORA applying on top for EU financial entities, insurers included. Attackers also treat financial organizations differently. The goal is often direct fraud or fund movement, not just data theft, which changes what detection needs to catch and how fast response needs to be.
NIS2, DORA, and which one binds you
Financial entities sit under two overlapping EU regimes and the interaction matters. NIS2 names banking and financial market infrastructure as essential-entity sectors. DORA (Regulation 2022/2554) covers digital operational resilience for financial entities specifically and applies from January 2025. Where DORA applies, it takes precedence as lex specialis, so a bank is not doing both in parallel: DORA's ICT risk-management and incident-reporting requirements substitute for the equivalent NIS2 articles. The practical question for a Greek financial services firm is therefore which regime governs which obligation, and that depends on your entity type rather than your size. Getting this wrong means either duplicated compliance effort or a gap nobody owns.
What coverage looks like in financial services
Two things drive the design. First, reporting deadlines are short and evidentiary: both regimes expect an initial notification fast, followed by structured detail, which means detection has to produce a defensible timeline and not just an alert. Logging retention, chain of custody and the ability to reconstruct what happened become compliance controls rather than nice-to-haves. Second, the threat profile is dominated by identity rather than malware: business email compromise against payment authorization, credential theft targeting privileged finance staff, and fraud that looks like legitimate activity. That pushes coverage toward authentication, privileged access and email security rather than endpoint alone.
Business email compromise
Fraudulent payment instructions sent from compromised or spoofed accounts remain one of the most direct financial-loss vectors.
Credential-based account takeover
Phishing and credential stuffing targeting employee or client-facing accounts can lead directly to fund movement.
Regulatory incident-reporting pressure
NIS2 and sector-specific rules carry short reporting deadlines after a significant incident, which requires detection and documentation to be fast, not just eventually accurate.
Third-party and ICT provider concentration
DORA puts explicit weight on ICT third-party risk, and regulators care about concentration: several critical functions resting on one provider. You need to know which providers are critical, what happens operationally if one fails, and be able to evidence that assessment.
Relevant Services
Talk to us about financial-sector security
Tell us about your environment and compliance obligations and we'll walk through what applies.