Kitakami Shinkin Bank Partners with XM Cyber to Continuously Reduce Risk

KITAKAMI, Japan/TEL AVIV, Israel, October 23, 2025; Kitakami Shinkin Bank has announced that they will be partnering with XM Cyber, the leader in helping organizations reduce risk and improve security with the Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework.

XM Cyber helps organizations move away from endless lists of vulnerabilities, and instead, fix the issues with the greatest impact to on-prem and cloud environments. XM Cyber enables security teams at major enterprises to build and operationalize their CTEM initiatives, to measure risk levels to business-critical assets, improve security posture, and reduce risk.

XM Cyber transforms traditional vulnerability management programs into a holistic CTEM program to identify vulnerabilities, overly permissive identities and credential issues, and misconfigurations. It then contextualizes them to potential attack paths, prioritizes them based on risk to critical assets, and mobilizes teams around fixing them for optimal outcomes.

Kitakami Shinkin Bank is confident this solution will help ensure their networks and data are protected from constantly evolving cyber threats, giving them peace of mind and allowing them to focus on their core business objectives. According to Cybersecurity Officer, Daisuke Takahashi, “Every year, we conducted vulnerability assessment and penetration tests while managing vulnerabilities manually. However, this approach resulted in incomplete risk identification, prevented continuous improvement, and left unaddressed vulnerabilities unresolved, leading to delays in risk mitigation efforts.”

With XM Cyber CEM (Continuous Exposure Management), they are able to automate risk visualization while maximizing cost-effectiveness for vulnerability assessments, penetration testing*, and ransomware countermeasures (attack path visualization) — all required by the Financial Services Agency guidelines in Japan. This enables operation with fewer personnel.

Says Daisuke Takahashi, “Moving forward, we plan to implement micro-segmentation products to visualize workloads and enforce strict traffic controls. By blocking attack paths identified through CTEM (XM Cyber), we aim to reduce vulnerabilities, suppress lateral movement, and minimize the potential attack surface. XM Cyber does not perform simulated attacks in production environments to obtain test results. Instead, it employs an architecture that aggregates entity inventory data into the XM Cyber cloud and performs risk analysis within the cloud, ensuring the system has absolutely no impact on production environments.”

According to Stree Naidu, VP Asia Pacific and Japan at XM Cyber, “We are delighted to partner with Kitakami Shinkin Bank. We all know the financial industry is fraught with threats and banks are at greater risk than ever. The fact that Kitakami Shinkin Bank has chosen us as their partner in improving their security posture and upholding their resilience to breaches is a testament to XM Cyber’s ability to protect the world’s most valuable industries.”

ABOUT XM CYBER
XM Cyber is a leader in hybrid cloud exposure management that’s changing the way organizations approach cyber risk. XM Cyber transforms exposure management by demonstrating how attackers leverage and combine misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, identity exposures, and more, across AWS, Azure, GCP and on-prem environments to compromise critical assets. With XM Cyber, you can see all the ways attackers might go, and all the best ways to stop them, pinpointing where to remediate exposures with a fraction of the effort. Founded by top executives from the Israeli cyber intelligence community, XM Cyber has offices in North America, Europe, Israel and Asia.

ABOUT KITAKAMI SHINKIN BANK
Kitakami Shinkin Bank profile in Japanese
岩手県北上市に本店を置き、地域に根差した共同組織金融機関として、地域の中小企業や住民の生活向上に貢献することを目的とした預金・為替業務や中小企業向け融資のほか、地域密着型の金融商品やサービス、中小企業向けのデジタル化支援などに力を入れている。

Kitakami Shinkin Bank profile in English
Headquartered in Kitakami City, Iwate Prefecture, we are a community-based cooperative financial institution dedicated to improving the lives of local residents and supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Beyond deposit and domestic funds transfer and SME lending, we focus on providing locally tailored financial products and services, as well as digitalization support for SMEs.