SWIFT is a global organization that helps its more than 11,000 financial institution customers, in more than 200 countries and territories around the world, get the most out of their secure messaging services. Being SWIFT compliant means that organizations can securely and seamlessly communicate financial information between users.
To enable compliance, SWIFT has created the Customer Security Controls Framework – a set of mandatory and advisory security controls for SWIFT users grouped into three overall objectives – Secure Your Environment, Know and Limit Access, and Detect and Respond – supported by eight security principles and 27 security controls. The graphic below (courtesy: SWIFT), summarizes the objectives, principles and controls.
The Clock is Ticking…
With less than 5 months remaining until SWIFT self-attestations are due, I’m sure there are still many financial services organizations with questions about what technologies and solutions can help them achieve compliance.
For those organizations who still have questions, we’ve mapped our privileged access management and vulnerability management solutions into the framework; specifically, we map into seven (7) of the eight (8) security principles, and 18 of the 27 security controls. Below is a table summarizing how our solutions map into the CSCF.
| SWIFT Mandatory and Advisory Security Controls | BeyondTrust Solutions Address Requirement? |
| 1 Restrict Internet Access and Protect Critical Systems from General IT Environment | |
| 1.1 SWIFT Environment Protection | ◊ |
| 1.2 Operating System Privileged Account Control | ◊ |
| 2 Reduce Attack Surface and Vulnerabilities | |
| 2.1 Internal Data Flow Security | ◊ |
| 2.2 Security Updates | ◊ |
| 2.3 System Hardening | ◊ |
| 2.6A Operator Session Confidentiality and Integrity | ◊ |
| 2.7A Vulnerability Scanning | ◊ |
| 2.8A Critical Activity Outsourcing | ◊ |
| 4 Prevent Compromise of Credentials | |
| 4.1 Password Policy | ◊ |
| 4.2 Multi-factor Authentication | ◊ |
| 5 Manage Identities and Segregate Privileges | |
| 5.1 Logical Access Control | ◊ |
| 5.4A Physical and Logical Password Storage | ◊ |
| 6 Detect Anomalous Activity to Systems or Transaction Records | |
| 6.1 Malware Protection | ◊ |
| 6.2 Software Integrity | ◊ |
| 6.4 Logging and Monitoring | ◊ |
| 6.5A Intrusion Detection | ◊ |
| 7 Plan for Incident Response and Information Sharing | |
| 7.1 Cyber Incident Response Planning | ◊ |
| 7.3A Penetration Testing | ◊ |
For a complete mapping of BeyondTrust’s products to requirements, make sure to download the technical white paper, Mapping BeyondTrust Solutions to the SWIFT Customer Security Controls Framework. The paper also explains how integrating privilege and vulnerability management into a common platform can help you deploy these solutions much faster to show quicker progress toward your SWIFT compliance goals.
If you are a financial services organization looking to accelerate compliance with SWIFT, contact us today!
Scott Lang, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at BeyondTrust
Scott Lang has nearly 20 years of experience in technology product marketing, currently guiding the product marketing strategy for BeyondTrust’s privileged account management solutions and vulnerability management solutions. Prior to joining BeyondTrust, Scott was director of security solution marketing at Dell, formerly Quest Software, where he was responsible for global security campaigns, product marketing for identity and access management and Windows server management.