This brief highlights why financial services are uniquely exposed to cyber risk due to the sensitive data and transactions they handle, citing an IMF note that attacks on financial firms account for nearly one-fifth of total cyber incidents, with banks most exposed. It then summarizes five 2023–2024 examples showing business disruption, data theft, and ransomware impacts: Prudential’s ransomware incident with impacted counts revised up to 2.5M; a ransomware attack on a banking technology provider affecting customers of nearly 300 banks in India; LockBit-driven outages at EquiLend with later disclosure of employee data compromise; multiple mortgage and loan company breaches including stolen customer data and multi-week outages; and the LockBit attack on ICBC’s US unit that disrupted trade c

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