Hardening to Improve the Security of Financial Institutions

The great importance of having financial institutions certified in PCI DSS is the generation of a security environment in terms of data protection and it is an incentive that positions financial institutions as professional, responsible, serious and reliable. This research work proposes the implementation of hardening techniques and the application of security methodologies that allow having an advanced level of security in order to reduce vulnerabilities and risks that may exist in financial institutions. Previously, articles referring to security methodologies and standards applied in different case studies were reviewed in order to have a reference and be able to apply them in our case study. The proposed methodology is composed of 5 stages 1) Information gathering, in which information mapping was carried out. 2) Vulnerability Analysis, performing the scanning of the network in the productive area. 3) Application and comparison of information security methodologies, which include: PCI DSS, OSSTMM v3, OWASP and the following scanning tools were used: Nmap, Xprobe 2, Wireshark, Netstat, etc. 4) Analysis of the results. 5) Report generation. The results of the study indicate a 2 improvement in the effectiveness of mitigated risks and controls. On the other hand, when comparing security methodologies, the PCI DSS standard scores better on the comparison scale for our case study, as it is closely aligned with internal banking processes (SMEs).