{"id":22499,"date":"2023-01-10T14:41:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-10T14:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/?p=22499"},"modified":"2026-07-22T13:27:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-22T12:27:10","slug":"allied-bank-adopts-a-proactive-security-strategy-with-recorded-future-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/2023\/01\/10\/allied-bank-adopts-a-proactive-security-strategy-with-recorded-future-intelligence\/","title":{"rendered":"Allied Bank adopts a proactive security strategy with Recorded Future Intelligence"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pakistan\u2019s largest bank relies on Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud to detect and respond to threats before they can do harm.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"
Awais Ejaz, Group Head\/CISO, Information Security and Governance at Allied Bank<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The financial services industry is changing quickly as institutions undergo Digital Transformations to meet client expectations for a digital and online banking experience. But while digital technologies are critical to innovation, they also expose financial institutions \u2013 already a favored target among threat actors \u2013 to greater risk. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As the oldest and one of the largest banks in Pakistan with more than 1,400 branches across the country, Allied Bank understands the importance of proactively protecting its brand and digital assets. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s why Allied Bank turned to Recorded Future to help it implement a proactive security strategy with intelligence at its core. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThreat actors are looking at your digital footprint outside the organization to launch an attack. You must take proactive measures. You have to monitor your digital assets. You have to remediate incidents. You must proactively protect your brand and your image. To do that you need timely intelligence. That is a must to have, for any organization, but especially in the financial sector,\u201d said Awais Ejaz, Group Head\/CISO, Information Security and Governance at Allied Bank. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Proactively getting in front of attackers <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Allied Bank\u2019s security team\u2019s strategy is to stay a step ahead of threat actors by proactively monitoring and protecting its external attack surface. The team sought a digital risk protection platform that would provide visibility into the bank\u2019s digital assets and any abuse of the brand logo, including phishing pages, fake mobile applications and data leakage on the Dark Web. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe biggest challenge we faced \u2013 the reason we opted for Recorded Future \u2013 was we did not have enough visibility into Allied Bank\u2019s digital asset inventory. We wanted to be able to see what digital inventory information was out there and to be alerted if any anomalies were detected,\u201d added Ejaz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The team also recognized the opportunity to improve its threat-hunting capabilities with more targeted threat intelligence. Allied Bank already had threat intelligence feeds coming from different publicly available resources but correlating this data and analyzing it in the context of threat activity within the financial industry was time-consuming, error-prone and not all-encompassing. The team wanted enriching and enhanced intelligence on a consolidated platform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After evaluating several intelligence vendors, Allied Bank chose Recorded Future. \u201cUnlike other competitors, the main differentiating reason that we selected Recorded Future was the huge amount of sources from which they are gathering intelligence,\u201d said Ejaz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recorded Future provides a comprehensive view of Allied Bank\u2019s threat landscape through a combination of automated analytics, human-finished analysis from Recorded Future\u2019s research division Insikt Group and advanced querying capabilities. The Recorded Future Intelligence Graph automatically fuses together billions of entities and delivers original research to dynamically categorize, link and analyze intelligence. This arms the security team with easy-to-consume insights that are integrated into Allied Bank\u2019s existing SIEM and security workflows. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protecting the Allied Bank brand against previously unknown threats <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recorded Future gives the team visibility into its own digital attack surface, as well as relevant attacker behavior from around the globe, within a single platform. Using SecOps Intelligence, the Allied Bank team also integrates Recorded Future\u2019s Intelligence to augment their SIEM data and workflows. This allows them to quickly identify and respond to anomalous behavior of which they were previously unaware. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere were a lot of threats, a lot of anomalies, which were unaddressed and were unknown to us. Because of the timely threat intelligence, and because of the digital risk protection intelligence which we got from Recorded Future, we’ve been able to keep up with those threats and we have direct visibility into those threats now,\u201d Ejaz added. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, the team discovered typosquats that could be used by threat actors to execute phishing attacks, as well as detect the presence of high-profile credentials on the Dark Web. The team also detected and responded to malicious hashes, indicators of compromise and command and control communications \u2013 all within the span of the first four months using Recorded Future. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faster and smarter threat hunting<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to enabling the team to remediate previously unknown threats, Recorded Future empowers Allied Bank\u2019s team to reduce risk more efficiently and effectively. \u201cThreat hunting has become very fast and easy with Recorded Future. We can search our environment for malicious activity and IoCs in the threat feeds and remediate those threats before they impact the business or our customers,\u201d said Ejaz. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Recorded Future Intelligence Platform includes dynamic risk scores and access to key evidence, eliminating the need to manually correlate data and prioritize security issues. This is done automatically, freeing the team to detect, assess and respond to the threats that pose the greatest security risk with speed and confidence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In turn, the team has become faster and smarter. \u201cThe capacity of the team has been enhanced because of Recorded Future\u2019s huge knowledge base. I think the team has learned a lot in the time that we have been using Recorded Future,\u201d Ejaz added. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Recorded Future, the team has the tools it needs to proactively remediate threats and manage risk. \u201cThe visibility we get into our attack surface and the massive knowledge base available with Recorded Future are incredibly valuable to us. We cannot imagine a security operations center at Allied Bank without Recorded Future.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pakistan\u2019s largest bank relies on Recorded Future Intelligence Cloud to detect and respond to threats before they can do harm. The financial services industry is changing quickly as institutions undergo Digital Transformations to meet client expectations for a digital and online banking experience. But while digital technologies are critical to innovation, they also expose financial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":22500,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,50,15,18,62,54],"tags":[4099,4100,701,79,174,758,205,4101,264,4102],"class_list":["post-22499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-industry-verticals-banking-finance","category-analysis-case-studies","category-case-study-newsletter","category-digital-transformation","category-enterprise-security","category-south-asia","category-used","tag-allied-bank","tag-awais-ejaz","tag-banking","tag-cloud","tag-cybersecurity","tag-finance","tag-pakistan","tag-recorded-future-intelligence","tag-security-2","tag-threat-hunting"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22499"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22833,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22499\/revisions\/22833"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intelligentcio.com\/apac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}