Financial Services Cybersecurity for New York Firms

Name: HIFENCE
Address: 1216 Broadway, Floor 2, New York, NY, 10001, US
Telephone: +1 (332) 241-6493

For New York RIAs, funds, fintechs, and broker-dealers: a security program built around the threats that actually hit financial firms - wire fraud, account takeover, insider risk - and the regulators that hold you to account. Assessment, zero-trust design, vendor risk, and a plan you can put in front of a client or an examiner.

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Why HIFENCE?

companies guided through compliance

breaches across active HIFENCE clients

50+

professional certifications on the team

years of industry experience

Your program is led by senior engineers certified in offensive security - people who know how an attacker reaches your wire process and your client portals, not just what a compliance checklist looks like.

Who this is for

Cybersecurity for financial firms rarely starts as a security project. It starts when a prospective institutional client sends a due-diligence questionnaire, when your cyber insurer tightens its requirements, when an examiner references NYDFS 500, or when a payment instruction turns out to be fraudulent. If you are a New York RIA, hedge or private fund, fintech, or broker-dealer with 50-300 people, this page is for you.

If that sounds familiar, these are probably your real questions:

If a wire request comes in that looks like a partner, what actually stops the money from leaving?
Which rules apply to us - SEC, FINRA, GLBA, NYDFS 500 - and where are the gaps?
Who has access to client and custodian systems, and would we know if an account were taken over?
Can we answer an institutional client's security questionnaire without stalling the deal?

How financial services security works with HIFENCE

The sequence is the same every time: understand the threat, map the regulations, close the gaps with zero trust and access control, then keep the program alive.

1. Threat model and risk assessment (2-3 weeks)

We map your firm against the attacks that actually hit financial services: wire fraud and business email compromise, account takeover of client and custodian portals, and the insider who already has access. You get a written risk picture tied to your systems - trading, custody, portfolio, email, cloud - not a generic checklist.

2. Regulatory gap mapping

We line your controls up against what applies to you - SEC and FINRA cybersecurity expectations, the GLBA Safeguards Rule, and NYDFS 500 (23 NYCRR 500) if you fall under it - and hand back a prioritized remediation plan. For the audit or examination itself, the same findings feed straight into our compliance work.

3. Zero trust, access control, and implementation guidance

The most effective control for a financial firm is verifying every access request instead of trusting the network. We design the segmentation and identity model, then guide implementation with your team - the same approach behind our zero-trust engagement for a US financial services firm.

4. Vendor risk and ongoing program

Your custodians, fund admins, and fintech APIs are part of your attack surface and your regulators know it. We build the vendor-risk process - due diligence, contracts, monitoring - and, for firms without an internal security lead, keep the whole program alive between reviews.

Typical time to a documented risk picture and roadmap: 2-3 weeks.

The first step is a 30-minute call.

Schedule a call

What you get: end-to-end financial data protection in New York

A financial-services threat model - wire fraud, account takeover, and insider risk mapped to your actual systems, with each item rated by likelihood and impact. One part for the partners, a technical annex for IT.
A regulatory gap report - where you stand against SEC, FINRA, GLBA, and NYDFS 500, with a remediation plan ordered by risk and examination exposure, and effort estimates you can budget against.
A zero-trust and access-control design - segmentation, identity, and least-privilege for on-premises and cloud, with implementation guidance your team can execute.
A vendor-risk process - due diligence, contract language, and ongoing monitoring for custodians, fund admins, and fintech vendors.
An incident response plan you can actually run - roles, escalation, and regulator-notification steps, so a wire-fraud attempt or breach does not become an improvised scramble.

Want proof this is more than a plan? We designed and guided a zero-trust rollout across the on-premises and cloud environments of a US financial services firm - the write-up is in our case studies.

SEC and FINRA cybersecurity, GLBA, and NYDFS 500: the rules behind the pressure

Financial firms do not choose cybersecurity in a vacuum - a stack of overlapping obligations decides much of what "good" has to look like. We translate them into one prioritized program instead of four separate fire drills.

SEC and FINRA

Registered advisers and broker-dealers are expected to have reasonable safeguards, written policies, and an incident response and disclosure process. Examinations probe access control, vendor oversight, and how you would detect and report an incident.

GLBA Safeguards Rule

If you handle customers' nonpublic financial information, the Safeguards Rule requires a written information security program with a named person accountable for it, risk assessment, access controls, and vendor management.

NYDFS 500 (23 NYCRR 500)

Covered entities doing business in New York face specific requirements: a CISO function, multi-factor authentication, encryption, incident notification within set timeframes, and annual certification. It is the most prescriptive of the four.

One program, not four

The overlap between these is large, so a single set of well-built controls satisfies most of them at once. We map the requirements together and, where a formal attestation is on the table, connect it to our SOC 2 compliance work.

The threats we build against - and what we are not

Financial firms are targeted for one reason: proximity to money and to sensitive client data. The three attacks that do the real damage are wire fraud and business email compromise, account takeover of the portals your clients and custodians use, and the trusted insider. Every control we recommend traces back to one of them.

So you know exactly what you are buying, we are just as clear about what we are not:

We are not selling you a product.

We do not resell licenses, appliances, or a security platform, and our recommendations do not depend on any vendor. If a tool you already own does the job, we say so; if it is overkill, we say that too.

It is not a checkbox exercise.

A generic policy pack passes nobody who looks closely - not an examiner, not an enterprise client, and not an attacker. We build controls that match how your firm actually trades, custodies, and communicates.

It is not a one-off report you file and forget.

Threats and regulatory expectations move, and so does your vendor list. The program has to stay alive between reviews - which is exactly what a fractional security lead is for.

Frequently asked questions

Which regulations apply to my financial firm - SEC, FINRA, GLBA, or NYDFS 500?

It depends on your registration and where you operate. SEC-registered advisers and FINRA member broker-dealers both face cybersecurity expectations from their regulators; almost every firm handling customer financial information falls under the GLBA Safeguards Rule; and if you are a covered entity doing business in New York, NYDFS 500 (23 NYCRR 500) applies on top. Part of the first call is sorting out exactly which of these are yours, so the work targets the right controls. The heavy lifting sits in our compliance advisory practice.

How do you protect us from wire fraud and business email compromise?

Wire fraud is the loss financial firms feel first, and it is rarely a technical break-in - it is a convincing email and a rushed approval. We harden the email and identity layer, put verification controls around payment and transfer instructions, and train the people who move money to spot the pattern. We have also run the response when it was already in progress: our case studies include a BEC attack stopped in four hours.

Do you actually implement zero trust, or just advise on it?

Both, in the right order. We design the zero-trust architecture - segmentation, identity, least-privilege access across on-premises and cloud - and then provide hands-on implementation guidance alongside your team or IT provider. We did exactly this for a US financial services firm; the write-up is in our case studies. For firms that also want their defenses tested afterward, that is a penetration test - a separate engagement.

We rely on custodians and fintech vendors. How do you handle vendor risk?

Your vendors are part of your attack surface and your regulatory responsibility - SEC, FINRA, and NYDFS all expect you to manage third-party risk. We build a practical vendor-risk process: due diligence questionnaires that fit a financial firm, contract and notification language, a tiering of vendors by the data and access they hold, and periodic re-review. The goal is a defensible answer when an examiner or a client asks how you oversee the firms you depend on.

We are a small RIA or fintech without an in-house security team. Can you help?

That is most of who we work with. You do not need to hire a full-time CISO to run a credible program - our vCISO services give you a senior security lead on a fractional basis: the threat model, the regulatory roadmap, vendor oversight, and someone accountable when a client questionnaire or an examiner request lands.

How much does financial services cybersecurity cost?

It depends on scope - your registration, the number of systems, how much you already have in place, and which regulations apply. That is why the 30-minute call exists: at the end of it you receive a proposal with a fixed quote scoped to your environment within 24h. If a client security questionnaire or an examination deadline is already burning, say so on the call and we will sequence the work around it.

Prefer to send a written question?

Send a few details and we reply within 24h.

The next step: see where your firm is exposed

30 minutes on your situation: which regulations apply to you, where wire fraud and account takeover could get through, and what an institutional client's questionnaire would find today. You leave with a clear read and honest priorities.

Schedule a 30-minute call