The road ahead: emerging technologies shaping the future of finance and identity protection

The rapid rise of FinTech can be attributed to the mutual integration of cutting-edge technologies, particularly AI and Blockchain. The finance and insurance sector ranked second among the industries most targeted by cyber criminals since 2018. Malware, phishing, ransomware, and DDoS attacks are among the most disruptive threats encountered. Besides, misuse of authentication tokens like stolen passwords, access key exploitation, and use of unsecured accounts to access the clients’ wallets belong to the prevailing threats. Despite industrial efforts to counter the challenges, the emergence of novel threats such as AI-generated deepfakes, social engineering, and automated account takeover attacks, outstrip the defenses and impose severe damage to various stakeholders. Like a game of cat and mouse, countermeasures and breaks are expected to continue evolving; so far, most countermeasures like source code obfuscation and metamorphic tactics have been proved effective. Due to the novelty and complexity of FinTech services, the need for manual analysis of the services have restrained the evolution of defense technologies. This introduces a novel and refined taxonomy of security threats in FinTech and conducts a comprehensive systematic review of defensive strategies. Through PRISMA methodology applied to 74 selected studies and topic modeling, this research identifies 11 central cyber threats and pinpoints 9 corresponding defense strategies. In this study, the taxonomy of cyber threats in FinTech services is enriched. Aligned with this novelty, a research gap on the preventive countermeasures is identified and an extensive survey of the defensive strategies against evolving cyber threats in FinTech is presented. The comprehensive systematic review offers invaluable insights for the academic community and other stakeholders of the FinTech industry. Available works on defending strategies are illustrated with informative materials. Similar to technologies, opponents’ knowledge would be circumvented and assembled as benign services. Thus, academia needs to constantly enhance the defenses for competitiveness against ever-evolving cyber threats. Desiring of regulatory and preventative capability acquired through this research, we hope that practitioners become aware of the current challenges in FinTech and know it well to realize effective countermeasures. The approaches are examined as an overview of the scientific understanding of FinTech cyber threats and corresponding defenses with perspectives spanning from classic ones to novel cutting-edge technologies. The review offers novel insights into FinTech systems design and the systematic investigation of threat-vulnerability pairs of found technologies .