Speed Is Security: How Financial Firms Limit Exposure with Rapid Remediation

In financial services, trust is currency. Customers expect their institutions to protect sensitive information and maintain uninterrupted service. But when new vulnerabilities are disclosed, every hour of delay widens the exposure window — and the financial sector remains one of the most targeted industries for cyberattacks.

Why Remediation Speed Matters

NopSec’s C-Suite Buy-In Guide calls out financial services as a perennial top target for attackers, citing “fast-evolving technologies, third-party risks, and the high value of customer data”.

Our 2017 Remediation Trends Report found that many firms take over a month to remediate critical web application flaws. In practice, that means attackers have weeks of opportunity to probe systems, exfiltrate data, or deploy ransomware before defenses catch up.

Microsoft Patches: A Case in Point

Recent Microsoft vulnerabilities highlight the stakes:

• CVE-2025-53770 (SharePoint RCE) — Actively exploited against on-prem deployments, which included the financial sector. Institutions that patched within days contained potential lateral movement; those that delayed faced greater exposure.
• CVE-2025-55241 (Entra ID impersonation flaw) — Allowed silent cross-tenant impersonation of Global Admins. While Microsoft auto-patched this in the cloud, it underscored how quickly identity-related bugs can be weaponized in finance.
• September 2025 Patch Tuesday — 81 fixes, including two zero-days, several affecting Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint environments still widely used in the sector.

These examples show why patch velocity matters: adversaries reverse-engineer patches within hours of release and AI is accelerating this process.

The Business Impact of Speed

NopSec’s 2022 State of Vulnerability Management Report found that only 18% of organizations patch critical vulnerabilities within 24 hours, while 62% take longer than 48 hours — some more than two weeks. In financial services, those timelines are unacceptable:

• Faster fixes mean less exposure — containing intrusions before significant data theft.
• Rapid response supports compliance — from NYDFS to PCI DSS, regulators increasingly expect tight SLAs.
• Speed protects business continuity — patching quickly reduces downtime and helps teams return to normal operations sooner.

Turning Speed Into Strategy

The good news: remediation doesn’t have to be chaos. Leading firms are embedding automation, business-context prioritization, and Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) into their workflows.

NopSec clients that adopted automated risk-based prioritization cut mean time to remediation (MTTR) by over 40% compared to peers, according to our 2020 State of VRM Report.

Best practices include:

• Establishing SLAs by vulnerability type and asset criticality
• Automating patch pipelines and rollback testing
• Using risk-based prioritization (exploitability + asset context)
• Regularly simulating attacks to validate exposure reduction

Conclusion

For financial institutions, speed is not optional. Each unpatched vulnerability is an open invitation to attackers — and a risk to customer trust. By embedding rapid remediation into the security program, firms not only meet compliance demands, but also strengthen their competitive edge.

Speed is security. And in finance, that means safeguarding both data and reputation.

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