Financial Services Is Getting Hit Harder Than Any Other Industry
Financial services topped the list of most-breached sectors again in the first half of 2026, with 387 recorded compromises, extending a run at the top that started in 2024. The sector now carries the second-highest average breach cost of any industry, at $6.29 million, trailing only healthcare.
None of this comes cheap, and it’s getting more expensive to fix. Organizations now take 247 days on average to identify and contain a breach, time attackers spend moving between systems and pulling out whatever they came for. Wait past the 200-day mark, and average costs jump from $4.32 million to $5.65 million.
Traditional Security Tools Weren't Built for This
Most banks still watch for threats coming in from outside while attackers already past the perimeter move sideways through the network, largely unseen. Encrypted traffic, fileless malware, and cloud workloads add more blind spots that legacy tools weren’t built to cover, and disconnected alerts only slow response further.
This guide breaks down where these gaps show up for banks, credit unions, and investment firms, and what a unified approach to detection looks like in practice.
What's Inside
- Why financial institutions face a harder security problem: legacy core systems, real-time transactions, third-party risk
- The blind spots (east-west traffic, encrypted channels, cloud workloads) that let attackers go undetected for months
- Why signature-based detection leaves teams a step behind, and what real threat hunting requires instead
- How Fidelis Elevate® unifies network, endpoint, deception, and Active Directory protection into one active XDR platform
- How deep session inspection, memory-based endpoint detection, and deception technology catch lateral movement and data theft in progress
- A four-phase checklist for assessing your current security posture
Get the full guide to see how Fidelis Elevate® helps financial security leaders spot attackers early, before double extortion, regulatory fallout, or reputational damage become the story.
The real question isn’t whether someone will get in, it’s whether you’ll notice before they get out.