Cybersecurity for Your Mortgage Company: What You Need to Know

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October 30, 2018 | By RGR Marketing Blog

Is Your Mortgage Processing Software Putting Your Company at Risk?

Mortgage companies deal with huge amounts of personal information and sensitive data. After all, just to get approved for a loan, a borrower needs to provide copies of their financial statements, tax records, credit information, and more. If your mortgage company doesn’t have up-to-date cybersecurity measures in place, then all this data is at risk of potentially being stolen by hackers.

This is especially the case when a mortgage company relies on older mortgage processing applications and software. As a general rule, the older a piece of software is, the more easily hackers can break into it.

To protect client data, today’s mortgage companies must comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA). This act requires mortgage companies to implement an Information Security Plan. Lenders are also required to meet the compliance and regulatory demands of the CFPB, FTC, FDIC, FFIEC, and state regulations. If you aren’t sure what you can do to strengthen your cybersecurity, then here are some tips and areas to focus on.

Prepare for the Worst-Case Scenario

Data breaches happen all the time (even with strong security protocols in place), and it would be foolhardy for you to think it couldn’t happen to your company. So, it pays to prepare for such an event if it should occur by creating an incident response plan. This plan needs to include a communications strategy that can answer the following questions:

Who will deal with the breach from the tech side?
Who will deal with industry and state regulators, and how?
Who will deal with the public, and how?

Your company is going to be judged for being exposed to a breach, but it will also be judged by how it responds to it. The better prepared you are, the better your reputation will be.

Perform a Data and Risk Inventory

While having an incident response plan is important, it is even more important to devise a security plan that can protect you as completely as possible. This requires knowing everything there is to know about how your company manages the data that it collects. Here are some things you need to consider:

What personal information does your company collect?
Where is the data stored?
How is the data protected?
How is the data used?
How is the data disposed of?
What controls are in place to protect unauthorized access to the data?

It’s important to note that personal information can also be retained in employees’ phones, tablets, computers, and even in printers. So, you need to have a plan in place for dealing with these factors as well.

Get a Cyber Insurance Policy

If your company is breached, then you will discover all too soon how much money it will cost you. In some cases, a breach can cost a company as much as $200 per file! Having a cyber insurance policy will help safeguard your company from having to foot at least some part of the bill.

How to Improve Your Cyber Security

To protect your data from hackers, you must learn to think like a hacker. While firewalls and other security methods are a good start, most hackers don’t even worry about trying to get past them. Modern hackers rely on what’s called “social engineering,” using things like phishing emails, websites equipped with malware, phone phishing, and other avenues. Hackers also use techniques like “spear phishing,” which intercepts customer payments and sends the funds to the hacker instead of the mortgage company.

Because social engineering is so prevalent among hackers, the first step in protecting your company is training your employees to identify such tactics. Employees should know what to look for and what to do if they believe they opened an infected email or visited an infected site.

The next step is to ensure that any software patches released by the makers of the software you use get installed immediately upon release. These patches mainly include security patches for newly discovered holes or access ways. The longer your software goes un-updated, the greater at risk your data will be.

Lastly, if you are using outdated software that is no longer being supported by its manufacturer, then you need to replace it with a program that is up-to-date. If you don’t, you’re telling hackers your company is wide open for business.

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Is Your Mortgage Processing Software Putting Your Company at Risk?

Prepare for the Worst-Case Scenario

Perform a Data and Risk Inventory

Get a Cyber Insurance Policy

How to Improve Your Cyber Security

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money today!

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Is Your Mortgage Processing Software Putting Your Company at Risk?

Prepare for the Worst-Case Scenario

Perform a Data and Risk Inventory

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How to Improve Your Cyber Security

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