Longer, smarter, AI-fuelled attacks: why UK finance firms need a sector-specific defence
New research from one of the world’s largest content delivery networks (CDN) Akamai, shows how cyberattacks on financial services have grown longer, more complex and increasingly AI-driven, reinforcing exactly the concerns UK regulators and the IMF have raised in recent weeks, and the reason Equity built Proteq Advanced for the UK finance sector.
Digital transformation continues to unlock real gains for banks, payment providers, wealth managers and the wider financial community. But the same connectivity, APIs and cloud-native services that power those gains have dramatically widened the attack surface – and adversaries are moving faster than ever to exploit it.
The latest sector data makes the trend impossible to ignore. The median duration of Layer 3 and Layer 4 DDoS attacks against financial services has surged by 738% since 2024, signalling a shift away from short, opportunistic disruption towards sustained, strategic campaigns designed to overwhelm infrastructure and erode customer trust. AI-powered botnets and coordinated hacktivist groups – including a notable rise in pro-Iran activity – are turning DDoS from a nuisance into a siege.
Regulators and the IMF are sounding the same alarm
This is not an industry-only conversation. In recent weeks, the most senior voices in global finance have said the quiet part out loud:
The common thread is clear – AI is compressing the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, while attackers concentrate fire on the shared infrastructure underpinning UK finance.
Why a generalist approach no longer cuts it
Nearly 80% of financial institutions have suffered a ransomware attack in the past two years – yet fewer than half have implemented advanced security technologies. Regional patterns make the gap starker still: EMEA absorbs 62% of all Layer 3/4 DDoS activity, putting UK firms squarely in the crosshairs.
A generic, off-the-shelf security stack — designed for any sector, owned by no one — simply does not meet the bar regulators are now setting. UK finance firms need controls that are calibrated to FCA and PRA expectations, evidenced for audit, and operated by people who understand the sector.
How Equity helps: Proteq Advanced
Equity has spent years working alongside UK finance firms — from challenger banks and payments businesses to wealth managers, brokers and the professional services firms that support them. We built Proteq Advanced as our compliance-focused cyber security solution designed specifically for UK regulated finance firms, addressing exactly the pressure points the BoE, NCSC and IMF have all just highlighted.
The bottom line
The data and the regulators are converging on the same point: cyber risk in financial services has shifted from episodic disruption to a sustained, AI-amplified threat to operational resilience and financial stability itself. Underinvestment is no longer a tolerable position.
If you’d like to discuss how Proteq Advanced can strengthen your firm’s resilience against this new generation of attacks — and help you evidence it to the FCA, PRA and your board — we’d welcome the conversation.