From SWIFT Fraud to Card Skimming: How Banks Can Proactively Stop Modern Cyber Threats

If you’re in financial services, you know that you’re in one of the most highly targeted sectors for cyber attacks, after all, cybercriminals go where the money is.

The range and frequency of threats for FSI is overwhelming in 2025. An Akamai report into attack trends in the sector shows that it is a top target for phishing and brand impersonation schemes. Then, phishing websites account for 68% of suspicious domains that impersonate financial institutions, leading to a rise in identity theft and account abuse. 

Financial services organizations also face threats unique to their function. We’re talking about banking system breaches and payment fraud. We see how cybercriminals target core banking systems, payment networks, and digital wallets to steal funds, manipulate transactions, and commit large-scale financial fraud. For example:

• Banking Trojan & Credential Theft: Malware like TrickBot and Dridex infect banking networks to steal account credentials. A famous example is the Zeus banking trojan, employed by botnet operators around the world to steal banking credentials and other personal data, participate in click-fraud schemes, and more. 
• SWIFT Fraud & Interbank Payment Manipulation: Hackers exploit bank messaging systems to send fraudulent fund transfer requests; Since 2016, over 80% of banks in the U.S., Europe, 90% of those in GCC countries, and 100% of Asia-Pacific banks have experienced cybercriminal attempts to misuse the SWIFT messaging network for cross-border fraud. One of the most well-known SWIFT compromises was the cyber heist on the Central Bank Of Bangladesh by Lazarus Group in 2016. 
• Card Skimming & Point-of-Sale (POS) Attacks: Cybercriminals use EMV chip skimmers and ATM malware to steal cardholder data. FICO announced a 452% increase in POCs [skimming points of compromise] from 2022. Just recently, a vendor of payment solutions experienced a vulnerability in NFC cards used with self-service payment kiosks that can let threat actors generate funds on the cards.

A breach in core banking systems or payment processing networks can lead to multi-billion-dollar losses, frozen customer accounts, and financial market instability. And, according to the IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024, the average cost of a data breach in the financial sector was $6.08 million, which is significantly higher than the global average.

Get Ahead of Attackers With a Cyber Range Approach

FS-ISAC’s latest Navigating Cyber report highlights that complex threats are testing the operational resilience of financial services and recommends that “to ensure operational resilience, firms must adopt a forward-looking cyber posture that incorporates proactive threat modeling, agile defense capabilities, and cross-border collaboration.”

One way financial services firms are testing their ability to respond to inevitable attacks is with a cyber range: a realistic, simulated production environment that mimics real-world networks, systems, and threats to safely model, study, and understand cyberattack scenarios and determine how people, processes, and technology can best respond.

These environments enable continuous testing of tools, processes, and team readiness, ensuring that defenses remain robust against emerging attack techniques. Unlike traditional ranges, which often rely on static environments and limited scenarios, modern cyber ranges are: 

• Dynamic and Scalable: Capable of simulating an organization’s entire IT, OT, and cloud infrastructure with real-time updates. 
• Customizable: Tailored to mirror specific environments and threats unique to the organization. 
• Advanced in Threat Simulation: Featuring real-world attack scenarios, from ransomware to insider threats, in a controlled, repeatable environment.

How does it work?

Cyber range providers know that every organization’s setup is unique, so they will work with you to build a range that replicates your exact environment, including payment systems, ATMs, and other common financial services systems like Windows and Linux servers, and EDR and SIEM solutions.

Within your cyber range, a realistic, intelligent simulation of your environment, security teams can initiate real-world attack scenarios and live-fire exercises, designing training and testing that can be customized as required. SOC managers and red, blue, and purple team leads can identify which training and tests are most applicable and assign them to their teams. 

Throughout the training and testing process, you’ll receive accurate and actionable metrics from the exercies—such as number of breaches prevented and detect and response time—so you can assess how prepared each team is for different scenarios. 

As individuals and teams are trained and tools are tested, the data and performance measurement you receive is crucial to validating your processes. It highlights missing links in your detection engineering, threat response, and other processes to identify key optimization opportunities and the actionable changes to execute them.

Finding The Right Cyber Range For Your Financial Services Organization

When evaluating a cyber range solution, FSI security teams should look beyond generic features. The stakes are higher in financial services, so the range must replicate the specific conditions your teams will face. Here’s a checklist of what to prioritize:

• Realistic Replica of Production Environments
  Look for ranges that can model your core banking platforms, SWIFT networks, ATMs, payment processors, and mobile banking apps. Live-fire exercises should include phishing-to-fraud kill chains, insider threats, and large-scale DDoS against online services. A catalog with FSI-specific scenarios is essential to make training relevant.
• Integrated Tools
  Your cyber range should integrate with fraud detection, SIEM, SOAR, AML, and payment monitoring systems to test how your actual stack performs under stress. The ability to validate API and payment gateway security is especially critical for fraud prevention.
• Dynamic Attack & Axctivity Emulation
  Defenses must be tested against a mix of legitimate customer activity (millions of logins and transactions) and adversary behavior. Look for ranges that can emulate real-world threat groups like Lazarus or FIN7, adapting their tactics as the scenario unfolds.
• OT/Hardware-in-Loop
  As threats expand to ATMs, POS devices, and smart kiosks, ranges should support simulations involving hardware and branch-level IoT systems. This allows you to test resilience against jackpotting, card skimming, and kiosk abuse without risking production systems.
• Deployment Options
  FSI organizations need flexibility. A strong range should offer hybrid deployments that keep sensitive training on-premises while scaling larger exercises in the cloud. Multi-region teams should be able to train together while respecting cross-border regulatory requirements.
• Individual, Team, and AI Agent Training and Assessments
  Make sure your range includes role-based content for fraud teams, SOC analysts, responders, and even executives and AI agents. Exercises should reflect real compliance obligations (like GDPR or SEC incident disclosures) and accelerate onboarding for new analysts.
• Live Scoring & Reporting
  Reporting should map directly to regulatory and compliance frameworks (PCI DSS, NIST CSF, FFIEC CAT) while providing actionable insights on fraud detection rates, time-to-contain, and resilience posture. Executive-friendly dashboards are key for board and regulator conversations.
  

Building a More Resilient Financial Services Sector

Attackers are relentless, and financial services remain a prime target. Firewalls, detection tools, and compliance checklists alone aren’t enough, and most organizations only account for 25% of potential threat scenarios. A well-designed cyber range can uncover significantly more blind spots, helping you prepare for the threats you haven’t even considered. For context, SimSpace helps identify 200% more threat possibilities, enabling our customers to prepare for what they couldn’t even see coming.

As one major bank leader put it:

“Cyber ranges allow our defenders to see real-world attacks happening on our network and respond to them. It’s the closest thing to a real-world environment.”
– Wells Fargo

For financial services security teams, the path forward is clear: prepare your teams continuously, validate your defenses rigorously, and make resilience a living practice.

If you want to find out how SimSpace could help you deliver a 300-400% boost in team effectiveness through realistic, scenario-based training, get in touch today.