On their part, many financial service company clients are elected to have their cards remotely controlled so that they can destroy them for security purposes in the event they are stolen. Furthermore, heading into the future, a financial service company will have a new opportunity to protect it from a cyber threat and stay quicker than the criminals – quantum computing, which processes operate at a lightning fast speed. This will be used to monitor and mitigate risk in managing people’s identities, power expenditure monitoring, ownership transfers, authentication of payments, insider threat monitoring, web services, and much more at a higher level of security.

Personally identifiable information (PII) was a concept that began with cable television services and originally banned cable companies from giving out customer data that wasn't in the pubic domain. The rise of the Internet, however, changed that interpretation by storing absolutely all user data and user activity records somewhere online. Thus, every business that processes financial information and similar sensitive data online is now obliged to use the services of cyber specialists. The Internet is a giant space that criminals can capitalize on for detection of websites' vulnerabilities where they can take advantage of user activity and gain access to data like never before. This has required particularly stringent data security laws worldwide.

Although companies and websites are allowed to use some public information, such as cookies for user preferences on websites and Google's use of search history and user activity from particular IP addresses to render ads more relevant, it is illegal for this data to be used to determine that person's actual identity. The legal definition of personally identifiable information (PII) varies greatly based on the region and jurisdiction and is subjective to a degree and based on courts' discretion; however, it includes data like the individual's name, address, social security number, place of work, profession, financial information, credit card number, medical information, etc. If such information were to become available to a criminal as a result of user activity, it could entail the theft of the customers' sensitive financial information, in which case the business would be held accountable and often is the sudden downfall of many previously successful companies .

Not only must online financial activities be subject to stringent monitoring of financial security practices within one's own region, but in nearly every case, businesses will have to monitor all worldwide data security standards due to the fact that their resources and websites are being visited by users all over the globe. While some jurisdictions have rather lax laws on data security risks, other regions are far more stringent about preventing these cybersecurity risks. Anyone dealing with visitors’ personal or financial information must follow each of the laws of their users’ government. The United States, where online data security monitoring is regulated on the state level, features some rather limited data security laws. For instance, Massachusetts has a peculiar data security law that defines personally identifiable information (PII) as a person's first and last name or first initial and last name in combination with the individual's credit card number, bank account number, social security number, or driver's license number. Meanwhile, it is not the possession of this information that is illegal, but rather the provision and abuse of it.

As much of a risk as cyber criminal activity poses and as justified are our efforts are to detect trojan horse attacks, detect SQL injection attacks, detect eavesdropping attacks, detect cyber crimeware attacks, detect cyber birthday attacks, detect virus attacks, detect MITM attacks (man-in-the-middle attack detection), and detect cyber worm attacks, the truth is there is another risk in detection and data loss prevention which must be accounted for – that of the insider threat, particularly when it comes to the financial loss risks. In fact, the participation of an insider is exactly how the majority of revenue is lost in fraud situations, affecting half of companies on an annual basis nationally. Often this happens because an employee was duped by social engineering activity – any form of a range of tactics used to trick an insider.

These activities frequently take the form of impersonation of authoritative government agencies or positions like one of the company's high up executives asking the employee to provide data or financial information. It can also be a social network asking the individual to log in or a fake copy of the company's portal used to acquire the employee's credentials. This risk can be mitigated by keeping sensitive data in an external hard drive as well as setting up an automatic data transmission filtering program based on the type of data that is transmitted. An external drive can also be used to back up sensitive data in the event that the internal data gets lost or destroyed. Since an external drive typically lasts 3-5 years, it’s recommended to back up the data on the external drive as well to prevent losing them.