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.
A typical bank program combines three engagements. VAPT gives a broad view across internet and mobile banking, internal networks and cloud. API penetration testing covers SNAP, open banking and partner integrations. A 24/7 security operations center watches for attacks between tests.
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. Testing supports compliance; it does not make the bank compliant on its own, and acceptance stays with your auditor, QSA or regulator. We retest after you fix the findings, ideally before the audit window opens. Our guide to penetration testing evidence for audit lists what reviewers usually ask for.
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 a CREST Member, accredited by CREST for penetration testing, and certified to ISO/IEC 27001:2022. 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 business days of testing.
This service is designed for commercial banks, digital banks, payment processors and teams running a core banking replacement. Anonymized examples: an AS/400 core banking test, a BI SNAP API test and a QRIS mobile banking module test.
Questions banks ask before testing
Does a security test make our bank compliant with OJK, Bank Indonesia or PCI DSS rules? No test makes an institution compliant on its own. Testing gives evidence for the controls your regulator, internal auditor or QSA checks, and whether they accept it is their call.
Can you test core banking and payment systems without an outage? Testing windows and limits are agreed in the rules of engagement before any access is shared, and engagements are scheduled with no planned outage. Anything that could affect availability is agreed with you first.
Should a bank start with VAPT, a penetration test or a red team? A common sequence is VAPT across your channels first, then focused penetration tests for new APIs and payment modules, and a red team once you want to know whether monitoring would catch a real intrusion.
Discuss your bank’s security testing. A scoped proposal follows within 24 hours.