Mastercard: Azerbaijan's financial sector keeping pace with world in cybersecurity

Azerbaijan's financial sector is keeping pace with the world in terms of cybersecurity indicators.

Suheyl Hamavioğlu, Mastercard's Director of Cybersecurity Product Management for Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, said this at an event titled "The Future of Financial Cybersecurity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence" held in Baku, Report informs.

"Analyses show that Azerbaijan is demonstrating fairly good results in this area. I focused only on indicators for the banking sector. However, the data presented covers the financial sector. At the same time, I also reviewed indicators for financial institutions in other data I collected across Europe and globally. Based on these comparisons, it can be confidently said that Azerbaijan's financial sector is performing quite well in terms of cybersecurity compared with European and global indicators," he said.

At the same time, the Mastercard official said that although Azerbaijan scored above 7 on a 10-point scale, two important areas still require attention.

"According to the analysis, these are application security and web encryption. Regardless of the field of activity, the report shows that organizations need to take additional measures in these two areas.

In terms of application security, publicly accessible web applications become one of the main targets, especially during periods of conflict or tension. In such cases, the risk of website defacement, abuse of APIs or credential-based attacks increases.

As for web encryption, threat actors are increasingly seen trying to monitor sensitive communications on both web and mobile platforms. This may create risks such as data interception, manipulation of communications and theft of user credentials. Therefore, organizations should consider strengthening encryption mechanisms as one of their priorities," he said.