Mexican Bank Enhances Security to Better Safeguard Customer Assets and Information

The Banregio Grupo Financiero S.A.B. de C.V, trading as Banregio, is one of Mexico’s leading regional banks, founded in 1994. Today it has over 3,000 employees working at 133 branches across Mexico.

As well as consumer banking, it specializes in services for small and medium-sized enterprises. Banregio has been listed on the Mexican Stock Exchange since 2011

Increasingly Sophisticated Cyberattacks
Mexico’s financial sector has grown rapidly in recent years, attracting the attention of cyber criminals as a result. As a leading financial institution, one that is critical to regional enterprise in Mexico, Banregio was experiencing an increase in cyberattacks.

“There are currently many security threats in the world. In Mexico we are starting to see more incidents and this motivates us to work harder to protect our customers’ information and the assets we hold for them. This is of great concern to us, to the general management and to the bank as a whole,” explains Victor Oziel Martinez Vázquez, Chief Security Officer, Banregio.

The bank must protect its assets (data, finances and corporate reputation), and those of its customers – for example, it holds many citizens’ inherited family wealth – and it must do so effectively and efficiently. The in-house security team was struggling to deal with increasingly sophisticated and advanced attacks.

The bank wanted to strengthen its network security, with greater means to identify and block new and advanced threats. It also wanted to centralize the security management of the entire threat landscape, including PCs and mobile devices, software, and data on the cloud, simplifying administration and proactively preventing cyberattacks.

Preventing Advanced Threats
Banregio uses a range of security solutions, but the central piece of its approach is based on Check Point SandBlast Network. This protects the Banregio data center network, where all customer data is held, and all financial transactions are processed.

“Protection based on signatures has become obsolete and we were looking for a new-generation solution that could identify threats, advanced or behavioral,” Víctor Oziel Martínez Vázquez explains. “Essentially, this is what motivated us to choose SandBlast Network.”

SandBlast’s advanced network threat prevention protects against advanced and zero-day cyber threats, preventing attacks, minimizing risks and offering rapid response. Its threat extraction feature ensures files are automatically cleaned and potentially malicious content removed, before they enter the network.

“This technology , SandBlast Network, allows us to ‘sanitize’ or clean any threats present in documents and provide information to our users without any risks or threats,” explains Vasquez. “It has worked really well.”

Insights for Improved Decision-making
Banregio also makes use of Check Point support to identify technical and operational best practices, and to upskill the in-house security team.

Security management is provided through Check Point R80, giving the bank’s IT team a view of the entire security landscape through a single management console. This allows multiple administrators to view and prevent potential cyberattacks in real-time, update policies and turn on automated responses in response to specific threats.

“We decided to install this version of security management primarily to ensure our strategy was centralized, simpler and allowed more effective  decision-making. Check Point R80 also significantly improved the presentation of information,” explains Víctor Oziel Martínez Vázquez.

Preventing the Unknown
Since installing SandBlast, the bank has seen a marked improvement in threat prevention, giving the security team peace of mind that customer data is being safeguarded from cyberattacks.

“Check Point has fully lived up to its promise,” says Víctor Oziel Martínez Vázquez, “the bank has yet to be impacted by a security breach and the result is greater assurance around the security of financial transactions and customer data.”

Making Threats More Visible
Using R80 Security Management to correlate events with the bank’s security center, he says, has resulted in better decision making and the implementation of a more effective strategy for dealing with threats.

“Check Point significantly improves the presentation of threats. We’ve made great use of the console,” continues Victor Oziel Martinez Vázquez.

“Compared to other technologies, Check Point has shown itself to be user-friendly, intuitive, easy to implement and adapts extremely well to different architectures, specifically ours. In our technology architecture, the implementation of Check Point was extremely transparent and fast.”

“It has been the differentiating factor among the solutions we’ve used. Check Point fully lives up to its promises. Obviously, it’s also part of the management of the bank’s processes and ensuring they are fully met,  but so far it has provided excellent results,” concludes Víctor Oziel  Martínez Vázquez.