Cybersecurity for banks and financial services
A bank’s digital channels are where the money is, and attackers know it. One flaw in a mobile banking app or an open API can let a criminal move funds out of customer accounts. The bank then has to answer to its customers, to the Financial Services Authority (OJK) and to the public.
What the board is exposed to
Fraud losses are only the first cost. A serious incident usually brings a regulatory examination, mandatory reporting, remediation orders and weeks of management attention. Customers who lose money, even for a day, often move to another bank. And because banks are linked through payment switches and SWIFT, a breach at one institution quickly becomes a question for its partners.
Supervisors expect the board to understand this risk and to have it tested. OJK’s rules on IT risk management and cyber resilience for commercial banks call for regular, independent security testing. Bank Indonesia sets security requirements for payment systems, including the national open API payment standard (SNAP). Card operations must meet PCI DSS, the card industry’s security standard. SWIFT members attest each year against the SWIFT Customer Security Programme (CSP). Customer data is protected by the Personal Data Protection Law (UU PDP).
How attacks on banks usually work
The most damaging findings in bank testing tend to come from a few familiar places.
The first is authorization in mobile banking and open APIs. The app checks that you are logged in, but the server forgets to check that the account you asked for is yours. Testers call this an IDOR or BOLA flaw. It is simple, common and very costly.
The second is the path from the office network to the payment systems. An attacker who takes over one staff laptop moves from machine to machine until they reach the payment switch or the SWIFT environment.
The third is people. Treasury and operations staff receive convincing calls and messages asking them to approve a transfer or reset a password.
What we do for banks
We test your internet-facing systems, internal network, APIs and cloud environments the way a real attacker would. We trace the realistic routes to SWIFT and the payment switch and show which ones work. Every finding gets a severity rating and a plain explanation of what it would mean for the bank.
The same work is mapped to PCI DSS (including the penetration testing and segmentation checks in Requirement 11), to SWIFT CSP and to OJK expectations. Your internal auditor and your QSA (the assessor who certifies PCI DSS compliance) can rely on one body of evidence. We retest after you fix the findings, ideally before the audit window opens.
Some boards want to know whether their security team would actually notice an intrusion. For that we run a red team exercise: a covert, goal-based attack, for example “reach a treasury workstation”, that measures how quickly your monitoring detects and responds.
Staff use of AI tools is a newer exposure. Nesgate is a browser extension that masks card numbers, national ID numbers (NIK) and customer records on the device before a prompt reaches ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude. It keeps a tamper-evident audit trail for compliance.
Practical details
Snipeyes is CREST-accredited and ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified. Our testers follow OWASP WSTG, PTES and NIST SP 800-115, and red team work is mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. Engagements are scoped by the number of systems, carried out under NDA and scheduled in your time zone with no planned outage. The full report arrives within 10 days of testing.
This service is designed for commercial banks, digital banks, payment processors and teams running a core banking replacement.