Leveling Up Cyber Fraud Prevention: Insights From FS-ISAC’s New Framework — and How DefenseStorm Helps

Financial institutions today face a daunting reality: cyber fraud is rising, it’s more sophisticated than ever, and it often slips through cracks when different departments operate in silos. Fraud, cybersecurity, and compliance teams each see only part of the larger story of a fraud attack. Recognizing this, FS-ISAC recently released a new publication, Leveling Up: A Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework for Financial Services, which provides a structured approach to coordinate efforts, enable more effective investigations, and ultimately prevent losses. Here’s a quick look at what’s inside — and how DefenseStorm can help bring this vision to life.

Part 1: Summarizing the Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework

1. A Central Goal:
   FS-ISAC’s Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework aims to break down barriers between internal teams, ensuring that cybersecurity, fraud, anti-money-laundering (AML), and other relevant groups share information and build a unified map of how criminals operate.
2. Five Distinct Phases of Cyber Fraud:
   The Framework structures a fraud incident into five phases, helping everyone involved (whether from fraud, security, compliance, or IT) pinpoint the specific tactics at work:
   1. Phase 1: Recon – The adversary gathers information and sets up infrastructure (like phishing sites or fake domains) before launching an attack.
   2. Phase 2: Initial Access – The criminal gains a foothold, often through phishing, social engineering, malware infections, or credential-stuffing.
   3. Phase 3: Positioning – Once in, attackers manipulate account details, add unauthorized users, or install further backdoors to set up fraudulent transactions.
   4. Phase 4: Execution – The actual theft or fraud transaction occurs, such as unauthorized wire transfers or disbursements.
   5. Phase 5: Monetization – The adversary moves stolen funds into mule accounts, cashes out, or converts them into other instruments (like gift cards or cryptocurrencies).
3. ‘Look Left’ — and ‘Look Right’:
   A key insight is the need to “look left,” meaning to trace backward through the earlier phases of an incident and understand exactly how the criminal got in. That naturally helps organizations “look right” as well — predicting the criminal’s next move and stopping the fraud before it reaches its final stages.
4. Cross-Team Collaboration:
   The framework emphasizes that successful prevention requires real-time information exchange and a shared language. For instance, cybersecurity teams are typically experts on the Recon and Initial Access stages, but fraud teams have deeper visibility into suspicious monetary transactions. Pooling these observations highlights vulnerabilities and illuminates missing links that neither team would see alone.
5. Practical Outcomes:
   1. Faster Response: Less time lost to confusion and siloed investigations.
   2. Stronger Controls: Being able to plug gaps earlier, so that the same attack pattern is blocked in the future.
   3. Sector-Wide Sharing: FS-ISAC champions sharing critical fraud intelligence across the financial services sector, creating an environment in which criminals cannot easily re-use successful tactics at different institutions.

Part 2: How DefenseStorm Aligns with the Framework

DefenseStorm’s integrated approach to cybersecurity, fraud detection, and compliance dovetails naturally with the Framework’s premise: that continuous collaboration and holistic visibility are essential to stopping complex cyber fraud.

Here’s how:

1. Unified Data and Visibility
   1. Challenge: FS-ISAC’s framework underscores how fraud schemes often involve multiple components across disparate systems — call centers, online banking platforms, and corporate network assets.
   2. DefenseStorm’s Alignment: Our platform centralizes and correlates data from across the financial institution’s environment (including threat intelligence, account activity, and network telemetry). This unified data lake means that if a suspicious pattern appears anywhere (Phase 1 through Phase 5), all relevant teams have instant visibility and can act quickly.
2. Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts
   1. Challenge: Fraud incidents often unfold quickly, and delayed alerts can mean significant financial losses.
   2. DefenseStorm’s Alignment: We provide monitoring across all digital channels, so any unusual activity tied to initial access, account changes, or large transactions can trigger an immediate alert. Our rules engine and machine learning algorithms detect anomalies across user behavior, device data, and transaction velocity, letting teams “look left” and “look right” simultaneously.
3. Cross-Functional Collaboration Tools
   1. Challenge: FS-ISAC calls for bridging silos between cybersecurity, fraud, and AML teams. However, these groups often use different dashboards and terminologies.
   2. DefenseStorm’s Alignment: We’ve built our platform to support cross-team workflows. Security analysts, fraud investigators, and compliance officers can annotate or share the same event record, so everyone sees the same facts and evidence. This “single source of truth” accelerates investigations and decision-making.
4. Threat Intelligence Integration
   1. Challenge: Phases 1 (Recon) and 2 (Initial Access) often hinge on malicious domain registrations, social engineering campaigns, or known suspicious IP addresses, yet many institutions lack a consistent way to ingest and act on external intel.
   2. DefenseStorm’s Alignment: DefenseStorm integrates natively with major threat intelligence feeds — to detect or block malicious domains, IPs, or file hashes before adversaries’ pivot into “Positioning” and “Execution.” This is central to the Framework’s emphasis on “looking left.”
5. Rapid Feedback and Continuous Improvement
   1. Challenge: The FS-ISAC framework is meant to adapt over time. Criminals constantly evolve tactics, so organizations need agile processes to refine controls.
   2. DefenseStorm’s Alignment: Our platform is designed for continuous improvement. After investigating an incident, teams can easily update detection rules or create new policy checks for the next time criminals attempt the same trick. This agility helps “shift left” in future scenarios, where suspicious reconnaissance or abnormal login attempts get flagged earlier.
6. Support for Regulatory Compliance
   1. Challenge: Fraud prevention strategies also must align with regulatory standards on consumer protection, incident reporting, and data handling.
   2. DefenseStorm’s Alignment: Our solution’s built-in compliance features ensure that key data points (e.g., evidence of suspicious transactions, intrusion logs) are stored securely and that audits can be completed seamlessly. This helps demonstrate your institution has systematically addressed vulnerabilities at each phase, from Recon to Monetization.

The new FS-ISAC Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework is a wake-up call for financial institutions: the best way to fight increasingly sophisticated cyber fraud is a unified, structured, and transparent approach that crosses departmental lines and, ultimately, extends across the whole industry.

DefenseStorm is proud to help organizations meet this challenge. By unifying cybersecurity, fraud, and compliance, we give teams the real-time visibility and cross-department collaboration tools they need to “look left, look right,” and stop fraud in its tracks.

If you’d like to know more about how DefenseStorm can help your institution implement FS-ISAC’s best-practice recommendations, please get in touch. Together, we can fight fraud more effectively, preserve valuable resources, and protect customers’ trust — not just for your institution, but for the entire financial services ecosystem.

Interested in learning more?

• Download and review the FS-ISAC report, Leveling Up: A Cyber Fraud Prevention Framework for Financial Services.
• Join our 3-part webinar series where we walk you through the framework, and talk about tackling these frameworks! MORE INFO TO COME!
• Reach out to DefenseStorm for a demo on how our platform can support your journey to holistic cyber fraud prevention