HDB FS: VTR helps achieve compliance, be confident
HDB Financial Services bagged the award for Best Cyber Security Initiative at DNA 2023 Awards from Banking Frontiers Jury:
HDB Financial Services, an NBFC catering to the needs of both individual and business clients, has always embedded information security in all its processes, projects and operations. It has successfully moved away from the earlier approach towards security, which was mostly reactive and adopted a proactive method whereby it has deployed an organization-wide and detailed ‘Vulnerability Threat & Risk Assessment’ (VTR). This has helped the company to protect its devices and data, identify vulnerabilities, check for weak security settings and get details on any security weaknesses in its environment. This has considerably reduced the possibility of cybercriminals breaching its systems and unsettling operations.
This initiative has helped it to have an i n-depth overview of the security environment and remain abreast of the ever-changing security landscape without losing focus on the agility and ability to deliver in a dynamic business scenario. It has also helped in having a detailed oversight to meet the increasing regulatory expectations and keep organization and our customer’s data safe.
VTR has helped the company to take appropriate and timely measures to reduce its overall exposure and create a secure environment for users. It has also helped it achieve overall compliance in line with the regulatory requirements, and create a sense of confidence in the management.
While such a readiness has helped in remediating risks, it has also led to an exact understanding of the organizational vulnerabilities and identification of potential threats and thereby initiating mitigation measures.
The company has an employee base of 50,000, spread over 1500 locations across the country. These locations are securely connected to offer services in a seamless manner. The security aspects are monitored 24x7 through a SOC. On an average, the system creates some 50,000 plus WAF alerts, 22,000 DDoS alerts, 35,000 Geofencing alerts, and 150,000 plus BOT attack alerts.
The company is also leveraging BitSight Security Ratings, which helps it to make use of externally observable data from sources across the world. The ratings enable it to identify instantaneously the risk of sharing sensitive data with third parties, including business partners, vendors and acquisition targets and take pre-emptive measures. BitSight Security Ratings also helps in due diligence while on-boarding IT vendors and check security posture of these vendors on periodic basis. The company has clocked a score of 800+ in BitSight Ratings (which is consistent for last 2-3 quarters), which puts it in ‘advance’ category and among the niche players in financial services sector.