January 2024: an unauthorized third party accessed sensitive personal data of approximately 16.6 million LoanDepot customers. August 2025: Allianz Life experienced a cyberattack that compromised the personal data of more than one million customers. February 2026: a ransomware attack on BridgePay Network Solutions rendered Florida’s City of Palm Bay online billing portal unavailable.
A clear pattern emerges, as financial institutions have become a high-value target for attackers.
These operations are often conducted by organized cybercrime groups or state-sponsored actors seeking significant financial gain or market disruption. If you work in finance and assume you’re safe from risks, you’re not paying attention.
The entry point is rarely sophisticated. In many cases, it starts with a phishing email. From there, attackers move laterally, navigating internal systems, escalating access, and positioning themselves closer to what they were originally after: payment infrastructure, trading platforms, and customer data.
Here's where many financial organizations lose control of the narrative: if network visibility is limited, that movement can go unseen until it’s too late; the average time-to-detect can span across 181 days.
This was the challenge of a leading financial organization, that sought to close the visibility gaps and reinforce their detection and response systems. To do so, they turned to OPSWAT MetaDefender NDR, deploying it across critical segments of their infrastructure to gain deeper insight into network traffic and detect threats earlier.
This is their story.
Poor Network Visibility Exposed the Customer’s Systems to Lateral Movement
The customer had traditional monitoring tools in place, which were primarily focused on endpoint alerts and perimeter defences. These tools worked great when it came to detecting known malware or suspicious login attempts, but their network visibility capabilities were lacking.
So, the network acted like an unseen area, which is precisely where security systems were most vulnerable and SOC teams least equipped to deal with incidents. Blind spots led to:
Latency in lateral movement detection
In banks and other financial institutions, lateral movement is usually the phase where attackers move from an initially compromised workstation (like a bank teller’s laptop or a back-office machine) toward high-value systems. These systems can be anything from payment processing, SWIFT infrastructure, or core banking databases.
For our customer, the delay derived from relying on perimeter-level alerts, which either arrive late or don’t trigger at all. With over 50k employees, there were many opportunities for attackers to breach the systems. A risk the customer was not willing to take.
Slow forensic workflows
In financial institutions, post-breach forensic investigations are often slowed down by fragmented data sources, as SOC teams might need to correlate firewall logs, endpoint alerts, or authentication logs. Even with the added pressure to act quickly, these teams might still have a hard time identifying what actually happened and the best approach to contain the breach.
To put it simply; SOC teams were blindfolded, and possible attackers would have taken advantage of this.
How MetaDefender NDR Accelerates Detection and Forensics
The visibility gap was closed with MetaDefender NDR; purpose-built for network hunting, MetaDefender NDR delivers the network visibility features and analytical tools which were missing from our customer’s arsenal.
MetaDefender NDR
MetaDefender NDR helps organizations detect, investigate, and respond to network threats faster without disrupting business operations.
By analysing network telemetry for abnormal traffic patterns identification, it detects lateral movement between systems and uncovers communications associated with cyberattacks.
The platform aims to scale the expert knowledge of a typical SOC analyst. With its AI-assisted detection models, it continuously analyses network behaviours to identify subtle anomalies that may indicate attacker activity earlier in the attack lifecycle.
For our customer, the platform solved the main issues hurting SOC performance.
Lateral movement detection
Rather than looking at endpoints to report activity, MetaDefender NDR observes east-west traffic continuously at the network level, while inspecting traffic flows between internal systems. As such, it can detect patterns like repeated authentication attempts, unusual connections, or communication between systems that normally never interact.
The latency is decreased through the combination of behavioral baselining of normal internal communication, and anomaly detection applied in near real time.
Faster forensics investigations
MetaDefender NDR continuously records traffic metadata and allows for retroactive analysis. Once an IOC (indicator of compromise) is discovered, the system can go back and check whether any internal systems communicated with it in the past.
Now, SOC teams don’t need to try and reconstruct traffic from the day of an incident or find previous logs; analysts can query stored network telemetry directly, particularly valuable in the financial sectors where extended time elapsed after an attack can lead to regulatory violations.
Moreover, AI-assisted investigation workflows helped analysts correlate alerts, prioritize high risk incidents, and reduce the manual investigation time, enabling the institution to move from reactive detection to proactive network monitoring.
Measurable Impact on SOC Visibility and Threat Detection
MetaDefender NDR shifted visibility to the network layer and applied behavioral analytics to internal traffic, which is especially effective in segmented financial environments. It also empowered analysts to spend less time gathering data and more time making decisions.
Here’s how outcome looks in all areas:
| Area of Impact | Measurable Outcome |
|---|---|
| Network visibility | Provided deep visibility into internal financial system communications. |
| Threat detection speed | AI-assisted analytics enabled earlier detection of suspicious activity and lateral movement. |
| Investigation efficiency | Reduced time required for SOC analysts to investigate alerts. |
| Operational protection | Improved ability to identify advanced threats operating inside the network. |
| Incident response | Accelerated response to potential attacks before escalation. |
| Compliance readiness | Strengthened monitoring capabilities required for meeting financial regulatory oversight requirements. |
If Threats Move Unseen, Visibility Becomes Everything
We’ve seen it in heist movies and we’ve seen it in real life. For financial institutions, the original breach isn’t dangerous in itself. If it’s caught in time, it can’t do much harm, other than showcasing a company’s weak spot.
However, there’s real danger when attackers breach a system but don’t rush to make themselves known. Instead, they observe, move stealthily, and find themselves near what matters most: payments or sensitive customer data.
That’s why security can’t limit itself to the perimeter. Otherwise, IOCs remain unnoticed until it’s too late.
By introducing MetaDefender NDR, our customer shifted from limited awareness to continuous network surveillance. Their SOC teams can now spot suspicious behavior as it unfolds, connect network signals into patterns, and act before anomalies turn into incidents.
If your organization is rethinking how it detects and responds to threats beyond the perimeter, it may be time to look beyond traditional controls and consider a network-level approach. Get in touch and see how MetaDefender NDR can work for you.
