Financial services institutions invest more in cybersecurity than almost any other sector, and for good reason. Driven by intense regulatory pressure and the fundamental need to protect financial assets, this investment has yielded clear results. Our latest research, The State of Pentesting in Financial Services, confirms this success: the industry has the second-lowest rate of serious findings we studied, at just 11.2%.
But this is only half the story. The same report reveals a deeply concerning paradox. While finding fewer critical issues, the financial sector's median time to resolve is 61 days—the third slowest of all industries we analyzed. This gap between discovery and remediation is creating a dangerous security debt: a growing backlog of known risks that quietly accrues interest in the form of increased exposure to attack.
An Underlying Reason for Remediation Delays: Operational Friction
What explains this slow pace in resolving serious issues? It’s not a lack of diligence. Instead, financial services firms are likely struggling with significant operational friction. This is a challenge born from the industry's own maturity and complexity, driven by a combination of factors:
- Fragile legacy systems: The risk of disrupting complex and brittle core banking systems when applying patches is immense. A single poorly tested fix could bring critical operations to a halt.
- Vendor dependencies: The sector relies heavily on specialized, third-party software. Security teams are often at the mercy of vendors to issue patches, with little direct control over the timeline.
- Rigorous change management: Internal change processes, designed to ensure stability and compliance, are necessarily slow and meticulous. This procedural caution, while vital, inherently slows down remediation.
- The burden of prioritization: With a constant, immense volume of security alerts and findings, teams must make difficult choices about which critical flaws to address first, inevitably leaving others on the back burner.
This operational friction, while understandable, is the primary driver of security debt. The result is a defensive posture that, while strong on paper, may be slow to adapt to new threats.
The Flaws Automated Scanners Can't Find
Nowhere is the need for a more agile approach more apparent than in the industry's web and API security. Our pentests revealed a high prevalence of two specific vulnerability classes—sensitive data exposure and business logic flaws—at rates significantly higher in financial services than the average of other sectors.
- Sensitive data exposure: Even with strong perimeter defenses, data is often not adequately protected within complex, customer-facing applications, or as it moves between systems. More than 10% of vulnerabilities in financial firms’ web and API tests were categorized as sensitive data exposure, a much higher rate than other sectors (with an average of 8.0%).
- Business logic flaws: These vulnerabilities are unique to an application’s intended function—for example, manipulating a transaction workflow to bypass fees or transfer funds improperly. Exploiting them requires a human attacker's ingenuity. Although the difference in prevalence of business logic vulnerabilities sounds small—2.9% in financial services vs. 2.3% in other sectors—the gap represents a major oversight for applications managing financial transactions.
Most importantly, these flaws are not found by automated scanners because they require a deep, contextual understanding of the application. This highlights the value of human-led pentesting: our testers cut through the noise of countless low-impact alerts to identify the truly exploitable issues that pose a material risk to your business.
Paying Down the Debt: A Plan for Financial Security Leaders
Addressing security debt caused by operational friction requires a strategic shift. Here are three practical steps security leaders can take.
- Prioritize for impact: Confront the burden of prioritization head-on. Adopt a risk-based model that looks beyond the CVSS score to understand the true business impact of a flaw. This allows you to focus your limited resources on the vulnerabilities that matter most, using insights from human-led pentesting to guide your decisions.
- Integrate security into development workflows: To keep pace with modern development, security must shift left and become an integral part of the software development lifecycle. By adopting a DevSecOps mindset and embedding security testing directly into CI/CD pipelines, you can find and fix vulnerabilities earlier when they are cheaper and faster to resolve. A pentest as a service (PTaaS) model provides the on-demand testing needed to make this a reality without slowing down innovation.
- Strengthen vendor partnerships: Treat your third-party vendors as security risks—and security partners. This is a critical blind spot that must be managed. Our survey revealed that 72% of financial security leaders view third-party software as a primary attack vector and 65% consider it a top IT risk. Establish clear service level agreements for vulnerability remediation and maintain open lines of communication to streamline the patching process.
The Time to Act is Now
The low rate of serious vulnerabilities is a testament to the financial industry's security investment. But it can also create a false sense of security when remediation times lag. The operational friction creating this security debt is a quiet threat, but it's a real one. Every day an unresolved vulnerability exists is a liability. The time to streamline your processes and pay down this debt is now—before the bill comes due.
