Over the last year, Invinsense XDR combated and prevented many of the cyberattacks against its customers from Fintech & Neo Banking, BFSI, Healthcare, Manufacturing & OT.
While combating these attacks, we observed that these cyberattacks have undergone a quiet but consequential evolution.
Cyberattacks are no longer defined by noisy malware outbreaks or crude brute force attempts.
Instead, adversaries are optimizing their attack techniques for persistence, legitimacy, and silence by exploiting valid credentials, trusted APIs, sanctioned cloud services, and business workflows that appear normal until the damage is done.
This shift is visible across every environment monitored by Invinsense XDR over the past 12 months: fintech platforms, large banks, SEBI regulated market intermediaries, healthcare organizations, and manufacturing enterprises with operational technology (OT).
The attacks differ in surface details, but the underlying playbook remains consistent, compromising identity, abusing access, extracting value quietly.
What follows is a retrospective of the real attacks encountered and disrupted across these environments. This is not a projection or a marketing narrative.
It is an aggregation of observed attacker behavior, correlated telemetry, and response actions taken in live customer environments over the last year.
Across industries, three types of cyberattacks appeared repeatedly.
Credential compromise remains the most reliable initial access vector. Phishing, business email compromise (BEC), credential stuffing, SIM swaps, and OAuth abuse were consistently observed.
Attackers favored valid logins over exploits, using compromised accounts to blend into normal activity and bypass traditional perimeter defenses.
As organizations expanded API driven architectures, attackers increasingly began to target business logic rather than vulnerabilities.
Abuse of payment APIs, trading endpoints, KYC flows, and partner integrations allowed attackers to bypass limits, scrape sensitive data, or manipulate transactions without triggering traditional security alerts.
Ransomware has not disappeared. It has matured. In many cases, encryption was secondary or optional. Attackers focused on data theft first, leveraging extortion threats even when operational disruption was limited. This pattern was especially pronounced in healthcare, BFSI, and manufacturing environments.
These attack types dominate because they align with how modern enterprises operate: identity-centric, API-heavy, cloud-first, and deeply interconnected.
Fintech environments are mobile first and cloud-native, built on microservices, Kubernetes, and extensive API ecosystems. They integrate with payment rails, merchants, aggregators, and identity providers while supporting real-time transactions and customer onboarding.
Over the last year, fintechs faced sustained account takeover and session hijacking attempts driven by credential stuffing, malware-assisted overlays, and SIM swap abuse. API abuse was equally prevalent, as adversaries manipulated parameters to bypass KYC controls, scrape transaction data, or enumerate offers. Phishing campaigns increasingly mimicked support workflows, QR-based payment flows, and UPI PIN screens. Ransomware activity targeted analytics platforms and data lakes rather than core payment systems.
Invinsense XDR correlated identity provider logs, API gateway telemetry, mobile app signals, and device fingerprinting data to identify abnormal login patterns, impossible travel, and suspicious token reuse. API abuse was detected through behavioral anomalies, high error-to-success ratios, unexpected spikes in high value transactions, and enumeration patterns across sensitive endpoints.
Response actions included automated session and token revocation, step-up authentication enforcement, WAF and API gateway blocking, and rapid throttling of abusive keys. Phishing driven compromises triggered disabling of malicious OAuth grants, removal of mail forwarding rules, and targeted user awareness actions tied directly to the incident context.
BFSI organibzations operate complex hybrid environments spanning core banking systems, cloud workloads, third-party processors, and high-value financial workflows. Identity sprawl and vendor integrations are unavoidable.
The past year saw a rise in phishing and deepfake enabled BEC, including voice and video impersonation of senior executives to authorize payments or policy changes. Data exfiltration via third party breaches was common, often linked to misconfigured cloud storage or over-privileged vendor access. Ransomware targeted back office systems and payment adjacent infrastructure, with extortion pressure outweighing operational disruption.
Invinsense XDR tied together email telemetry, collaboration platforms, identity logs, ERP systems, and cloud storage activity. BEC attempts were flagged through combinations of suspicious mail rules, anomalous logins, and high-risk payment requests occurring shortly after credential compromise.
SOAR playbooks automatically quarantined malicious emails, placed holds on high-value transactions, and enforced out of band verification for sensitive workflows. For data exfiltration, the platform detected bulk downloads from low-usage buckets and unusual data transfers to external IP ranges, triggering key revocation, secret rotation, and policy enforcement. Evidence packages were generated automatically to support regulatory and audit requirements.
Brokers, exchanges, AMCs, and RTAs rely on trading platforms, investor portals, proprietary research systems, and high-volume APIs. Compliance and audit visibility are as critical as threat detection.
The most common incidents involved trading account takeover, where compromised broker or relationship manager accounts were used to place unauthorized trades or leak sensitive positions. Market data and research exfiltration targeted proprietary insights and algorithmic strategies. API abuse enabled scraping of portfolios and investor information.
Invinsense XDR correlated trading logs, identity activity, CRM access, and API calls to detect abnormal trading behavior, unusual devices, geographies, product usage, or parameter patterns. When detected, response actions included freezing online trading, requiring manual verification, and notifying risk and compliance teams in real time.
For data exfiltration, the platform monitored file shares, research portals, Git repositories, and VPN usage. Mass downloads, suspicious archives, or transfers to non-standard destinations triggered account suspension, channel blocking, and immediate escalation to governance teams with full forensic timelines.
Healthcare environments span clinical systems (HIS, EMR, PACS), billing platforms, cloud services, and a web of third party business associates. Availability and data confidentiality are equally critical.
Healthcare organizations experienced ransomware targeting clinical and billing systems, often accompanied by data theft. Third-party vendor breaches exposed large volumes of PHI and PII. In many cases, attackers opted for silent data exfiltration without encryption, monetizing stolen records rather than disrupting operations.
Invinsense XDR detected ransomware through endpoint telemetry, file server activity, and backup system monitoring. Our platform identified encryption patterns, suspicious process trees, and shadow copy deletion attempts. Affected segments were isolated automatically, with backup integrity checks and restoration workflows initiated.
Vendor related incidents were detected through anomalous access patterns on B2B VPNs and service accounts. Invinsense automatically disabled vendor access, alerted legal and compliance teams, and mapped incidents to contractual and regulatory controls. Silent data exfiltration was identified through abnormal database queries, bulk exports, and outbound transfers, which were halted in real time while preserving forensic evidence.
Manufacturing environments combine IT systems with OT assets, engineering workstations, HMIs, PLCs, and legacy protocols, often connected through jump servers and remote access solutions.
Ransomware groups targeted OT adjacent IT systems, seeking lateral movement into production environments. Remote access abuse via VPNs and RDP was a common entry point. Attackers also scanned for exposed ICS protocols and exfiltrated sensitive production data rather than causing immediate disruption.
Invinsense XDR leveraged OT aware sensors, firewall telemetry, endpoint logs, and directory services to detect anomalous remote sessions, lateral movement, and unauthorized access to OT subnets. Response actions included disabling VPN accounts, closing RDP access, dynamically enforcing network segmentation, and triggering OT specific incident runbooks. In some environments, continuous attack simulation validated segmentation controls before attackers could exploit them.
Across all sectors, several themes emerged consistently:
Invinsense XDR’s impact did not come from isolated tools but from integrated operational visibility. By unifying telemetry across identity, endpoint, cloud, APIs, and OT environments, the platform allowed analysts to see attacker behavior as a sequence rather than fragmented alerts.
Detections were mapped to MITRE ATT&CK behaviors, allowing teams to understand intent and progression. Context-aware SOAR playbooks executed industry appropriate responses, whether freezing trades, isolating OT segments, or disabling vendor access, without relying solely on manual intervention. Threat intelligence and AI assisted prioritization helped surface incidents that represented real business risk, not just technical anomalies.
The attacks of the last 12 months reinforce a clear message for CISOs:
The organizations that fared best were not those with the most alerts, but those with coherent visibility, contextual response, and the ability to act decisively before silent attacks became public incidents.
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