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21/08/2026 4:56 pm
TL;DR: Financial services data shows information disclosure, injection flaws, and ransomware remained prevalent in 2024, while INTIGRITI reports average breach costs reached $6.08 million and nearly 1 in 4 firms were breached. The lesson for IAM and security teams is that weak access control and exposed trust paths still turn ordinary application flaws into material identity and data risk.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by INTIGRITI: Finance industry: Top vulnerabilities in 2024 and what to watch for in 2025
By the numbers:
- The financial services industry’s average data breach cost rose to $6.08 million in 2024, up from $5.90 million in 2023.
- Nearly 1 in 4 financial businesses have fallen victim to a data breach.
- LoanDepot’s 2024 breach exposed the personal information of nearly 17 million customers.
Questions worth separating out
Q: What breaks when finance applications have weak object-level authorization?
A: Attackers can change an identifier or request parameter and retrieve another user’s data, transaction history, or account details.
Q: Why do injection flaws create outsized risk in financial services?
A: Because finance systems often connect customer workflows, support tools, and privileged backends.
Q: How should security teams stop deepfake impersonation from bypassing identity proofing?
A: Teams should combine liveness detection, document validation, device intelligence, and risk-based step-up checks at the points where attackers gain the most value.
Practitioner guidance
- Tighten object-level authorization on finance workflows Review every customer-facing and internal API that returns account, transaction, or support data.
- Separate privileged support access from normal application paths Move remote support, admin, and break-glass functions into distinct authentication and authorization flows with stronger logging and approval.
- Harden identity verification against synthetic fraud Add step-up checks for payment changes, account recovery, and high-risk service desk actions.
What's in the full article
INTIGRITI’s full article covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Research-community examples of how small request changes exposed transaction and account data.
- More detail on the command injection case affecting privileged remote access tooling and what made it exploitable.
- Sector-specific recommendations for hardening financial applications against disclosure and injection flaws.
- The article’s 2025 watchlist for AI-driven social engineering, ransomware evolution, and synthetic identity risk.
👉 Read INTIGRITI’s analysis of 2024 finance-sector vulnerabilities and 2025 threats →
Finance sector vulnerabilities in 2024: what should IAM teams fix first?
Explore further
21/08/2026 5:13 pm
Identity control failures, not just application bugs, are what turn finance-sector vulnerabilities into breach events. The article’s examples repeatedly show that unauthorized access, not simply malformed input, is the point where technical flaws become business risk. That is an IAM and PAM problem as much as an application security problem, because authorization checks, support access, and transaction permissions define the real boundary. Practitioners should read these vulnerabilities as governance failures around access, not isolated code defects.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when account takeover and synthetic identity fraud occur?
A: Accountability usually sits across fraud, IAM, security, and product teams because the failure spans onboarding, session trust, and action-level controls. In practice, the owner should be the team that can change the decision point where abuse becomes possible. Shared risk does not mean shared inaction.
👉 Read our full editorial: Financial services vulnerabilities in 2024 reveal persistent identity gaps
