Identity Security for Finance

The identity shape of a financial institution

Finance combines the hardest requirements of every other sector and adds its own:

• Everything is audited. It isn’t enough to control access — you have to evidence it. Who held which privilege, who approved it, what they did with it, and when it was reviewed. An access control you can’t evidence is an audit finding.
• The privileged accounts reach the money. Core banking, payment systems, trading platforms and the databases behind them are administered by a small number of people whose accounts are the highest-value targets in the building.
• The insider is a real threat model here. Someone with legitimate access, misusing it, is not a hypothetical in finance — and every action they take is, by definition, permitted.
• Third-party and ICT risk is now regulated directly. The providers and vendors who reach your systems are your exposure, and regulators now hold you accountable for their access.

In finance, a control that works but can’t be proven to work is worth very little.

Where the exposure concentrates

The scenarios that keep finance CISOs awake are about legitimate access turned against them. Privileged administrators of core systems, whose credentials reach everything — if the account is compromised, or if the legitimate user misuses the access they hold. Standing entitlements that accumulated over years and were never reviewed, so people can reach systems nobody remembers granting. And ICT providers with remote access to critical functions, whose own compromise becomes yours.

What the regulations require

Mirket doesn’t confer compliance — no product does. But finance carries the most specific identity requirements of any sector, and an auditor will arrive with them in hand.

Where to start

1. Make every privileged session provable

Privileged access management vaults the credentials, injects them so administrators never hold them, and records privileged activity as video and searchable session data — which turns “who did what to core banking” from an investigation into a query, and gives the auditor evidence rather than assurances.

2. Grant access for the task, not forever

Replace standing PAM access with approved access that exists only for the required window. Just-in-time access makes reaching a privileged system something that is requested with a reason, approved by somebody else, and closed on the clock.

The privileged account may still exist on the target system; the user’s ability to reach it through Mirket does not have to exist permanently. What the auditor gets from that is a named approver and a written reason attached to every privileged session, rather than an entitlement list nobody can date.

3. Strong authentication across critical paths

Apply MFA across the critical authentication paths that assessments probe — VPN and firewall access, operating-system logon, legacy applications and federated applications — from one platform rather than four separate projects.

4. Watch for the insider and the takeover

Identity threat detection evaluates behaviour against each identity’s own baseline, allowing misuse or compromise to surface even when the account itself is legitimate and every action it takes is permitted.

5. Control your ICT providers’ access

Give each provider a scoped, recorded, time-bounded route to the systems they support instead of standing network access. Third-party and vendor access is the direct answer to the third-party requirements DORA places on you.

What changes

Related

Solutions — Just-in-Time Access · RDP & SSH Session Recording · Session Control & Command Policy · Third-Party & Vendor Access

Products — Privileged Access Management · Multi-Factor Authentication · Identity Threat Detection & Response