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Citizens National Bank of Texas, the third-oldest independent financial institution in the state, has remained deeply committed to its local community since its founding in 1868. The bank’s hometown, personalized approach to serving customers in the Dallas-Fort Worth area has played an integral role in its success. It was this focus on the surrounding community that led CNB to provide its customers with an extra layer of security by working with DefenseStorm, a Seattle-based provider of cloud based cybersecurity solutions.

As a full-service community bank with $859 million in assets, CNB aims to offer its customers the same service they would receive at any major, nationwide financial institution. This includes technology-driven services like online banking, mobile banking and bill pay. To offer these digital banking capabilities without exposing its network to new security vulnerabilities, CNB invested in security infrastructure and additional safeguards to protect customers and their financial information from potential cyber attacks. Although it had a solid system of security measures in place, the bank needed help monitoring its overall network activity and sought to increase the visibility of security threats.

This is where DefenseStorm comes in.

Heightened Visibility with a Cybersecurity Control Tower
DefenseStorm acts as security control tower for CNB to detect intrusions, investigate threats, take action to stop attacks and report on cybersecurity to regulators and the bank’s board of directors. Additionally, DefenseStorm’s team of security experts provides the bank with 24/7 monitoring support, triaging alerts and working alongside the bank to ensure the strongest security possible.

By constantly monitoring network activity and working with the bank to improve its security posture and quickly resolve incidents, DefenseStorm has helped CNB discover and neutralize at least 10 cyber threats in the past year.

Previously, the bank’s internal team would have to review and analyze all security event data. Now, the bank receives alerts in real time, which allows for a more efficient response and remediation process. Additionally, the bank uses DefenseStorm’s support ticketing feature to provide a clear, documented way to track events and how they are being handled.

Wade Jones, CNB’s senior vice president and chief information officer, values the extra support DefenseStorm provides. “It’s nice, the guardianship—having a security team sitting behind me watching the front line and letting me know if there’s something we need to work on,” says Jones.

Genuine Threat or False Alert?
CNB also leverages DefenseStorm’s search and reporting features, which enable the bank to transform complex and unstructured security event data from separate systems into meaningful, actionable insight. Oftentimes, systems will produce a constant stream of security alerts, many of which are not genuine threats, but which analysts must still review. With only eight hours in the workday, it can be difficult to assess each alert—and that can desensitize employees toward alerts, potentially resulting in a genuine threat being ignored. CNB has overcome this challenge and enacted a more proactive security response by sharpening its ability to interpret large sets of event data, so the bank is only notified if a threat is genuine. Now, the bank can quickly determine the scope of a threat and escalate the event into the remediation process with a click of a button.

The ability to provide a unified, comprehensive view of the bank’s network and systems is vital. “In our journey with DefenseStorm, we’ve brought everything together, log-wise, for all systems in the bank so we can take a more holistic approach,” says Mark Singleton, chief executive officer at CNB.

Enhancing Security without Expanding Staff
Furthermore, DefenseStorm brings a level of cybersecurity expertise that would be difficult for CNB to recruit in its own market. Given the shortage of cybersecurity talent across industries, hiring qualified candidates is challenging, especially for a small community bank, as professionals with advanced security credentials are typically hired by larger corporations. To make it worse, cyber criminals realize this, often assuming that a smaller bank has less sophisticated technology and fewer defenses. However, with DefenseStorm, CNB is able to provide an enhanced level of security, comparable to larger financial institutions, without hiring an extra security expert.

For community banks, business is personal. CNB realizes this and has invested in the infrastructure needed to safeguard its customers’ financial assets.

“Unlike big banks that never see their customers outside of work, we run into ours all the time—at church or at the grocery store,” says Singleton. “If we mess up, it’s our communities, our friends and our grandmothers who are ultimately affected. It’s our job to protect them and DefenseStorm helps us do that.”

Sean Feeney