How Large Italian Financial Institution Prioritizes Risk and Improves Security Posture
“It’s a great product. It helped me prioritize exposures in a way that wasn’t possible before. Without XM Cyber, some of these issues would still be in the shadows.”
Security Analyst, Financial Services
TL;DR
XM Cyber mapped attack paths and surfaced the choke points that connected to real risk, so the team could focus remediation on the exposures that mattered. Their security score improved steadily, and quarterly reviews with top management made that progress visible to leadership.
“Every three months, we review the value XM Cyber has generated. It helps us show real progress to leadership.”
Security Analyst, Financial Services
Meet the Client
- Location
- Italy
- Industry
- Financial Services
- Employees
- 8,500
- About the Company
- A large Italian financial services firm with a security team responsible for protecting critical assets across the organization’s infrastructure.
The Challenge
The security team at a large Italian financial services firm was overloaded with vulnerability data. Their traditional scanners flagged issue after issue, but didn’t help the team figure out what really mattered – or where to start prioritizing.
“We needed to know which elements could compromise our critical assets – which choke points had to be fixed in our infrastructure,” said their Lead Detection and Response Analyst.
Without context, every vulnerability looked urgent. It was hard to focus, hard to prioritize, and even harder to explain progress to leadership. What the team lacked was visibility into exposures – the subset of vulnerabilities that actually connect to attack paths and could be used to reach critical assets. They needed a way to separate these real risks from the dead ends.
The Solution
The company implemented XM Cyber to see how attackers could reach critical assets. By enabling them to visualize attack paths and pinpoint choke points, the platform reshaped the team’s approach to risk.
“XM Cyber helped me identify hidden parts of our infrastructure and understand vulnerabilities that traditional scanners missed. One example was a vulnerability in the print spooler; even after applying a patch, the real issue was a misconfiguration. XM Cyber showed me what still needed to be fixed.”
Security Analyst, Financial Services
The onboarding process was fast and smooth. “XM Cyber gave us a fully pre-configured platform. It was easy to deploy,” he shared. Ongoing support from the XM Cyber team helped the company stay on track. “We work with XM Cyber all the time. Continuous communication with their technical operations team is very important to us.”
Benefits & Outcomes
The team started with a security score that indicated critical risk. As they remediated key choke points identified by XM Cyber, that score steadily improved. The platform helped the team focus only on the elements that could be used by an attacker – spending less time chasing vulnerabilities that don’t present real risk.
Now, every three months, the team reviews the improved security score with top management, making it easy to show the value of their work. The CISO now understands that prioritization is key, and the team consistently arranges remediations based on XM Cyber’s recommendations.
Key Takeaways
- Traditional scanners overloaded the team with vulnerability data and provided no way to identify which issues threatened critical assets.
- XM Cyber surfaced hidden infrastructure and exposures that the scanners missed - including misconfigurations that survived patching.
- Attack path visualization and choke point identification gave the team a new way to think about risk, and the security score improved steadily as the team fixed the choke points XM Cyber identified.
- Quarterly score reviews with top management made progress visible and changed how leadership views vulnerability management.
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