While the image of frenzied trading floors long represented equity exchanges, today, the bulk of these types of financial trading transactions (stock, options, currency, commodities, etc.), occur via electronic exchanges.
The transformation from face-to-face transactions to electronic has yielded enormous benefits for investors, including reduced transaction costs, better liquidity--as buyers and sellers across the globe are more swiftly and easily matched, vastly increased price transparency with quotes available instantaneously, improved convenience for investors, and more.
Of course, as the footprint of electronic trading has expanded, with trillions of dollars in value transacted and routed daily, so too has the cyberattack surface. The prospect of ill-gotten financial riches continues to motivate many, while the ability to roil and undermine financial markets presents an over-sized carrot for socio-politically motivated hackers. In fact, earlier this month Anonymous took down the London Stock Exchange (LSE) website for over 2 hours in a flexing of power, and as a general protest against, the world’s banks and financial institutions.
Reducing the Attack Surface with Privileged Access Management
So, how do today’s electronic exchanges meet the demanding needs of customers who expect instantaneous transactions and timely news, while securing their infrastructure and data-in-motion?
BeyondTrust customer Miami International Holdings (MIAX) provides a completely electronic options trading exchange through its subsidiary, MIAX Options, which today lists and trades options on over 2,300 multi-listed classes, and has the mind-blowing throughput to provide over 38 million quotes per second.
To become an SEC approved national security exchange, you bet MIAX had to satisfy a thicket of security and compliance criteria. And, as MIAX has expanded into other business ventures, additional compliance complexities and security demands arose that they needed to address.
MIAX decided on BeyondTrust’s extensible PowerBroker privilege access management (PAM) platform because it could meet their immediate security requirements around privileged account management during their initial push to become an approved exchange, while allowing them to activate other best of breed solutions within the centralized platform along the way as new demands arose.
“We required a solution which could handle the high demands of our environment, but yet not get in the way of our Admins daily job of managing the complexities of the environment. The PowerBroker for Unix & Linux [PBUL] solution helped us satisfy the ‘full auditability and accountability’ requirement of our trading system in an unobtrusive manner.” – John Masserini, CSO, Miami International Holdings, Inc.After deploying PowerBroker for Unix & Linux, MIAX added PowerBroker Password Safe, which streamlines how they manage, secure, rotate, and report on their privileged credentials (passwords, SSH keys, etc.), to improve their privilege credential security, while also saving their admins hours and hours of time with is high levels of automation. Through the BeyondTrust BeyondInsight centralized analytics platform, MIAX was able to centrally integrate privileged access intelligence from PowerBroker, along with feeds from SIEM and other tools, for a truly holistic risk management visibility. Curious about the privilege credential security and compliance challenges MIAX had to tackle on its way to becoming a leading options trading exchange? Then, check out this video interview of Miami International Holdings CISO, John Masserini, and read the case study. If you're interested in how BeyondTrust can help secure your IT infrastructure, contact us today.
