Financial Services

SIX automates key cybersecurity tasks to actively protect itself against social media threats

Switzerland is known around the world for its strong and reliable finance industry. As a key platform for that industry, SIX must protect its brand, business, and clients from fake news, spoof accounts, hacking, and other threats. The consequences of not doing so could be disastrous.

In 2016, SIX decided to extend its security measures group-wide, with a focus on social media. The company turned to Hootsuite and its integrated ecosystem of specialized social media tools to provide the robust social media protection it needed.

1. Targeted phishing attacks

2. PR crises that can quickly spiral out of control

3. Financial fraud and misinformation

4. Compliance breaches in a highly regulated industry

5. Fake news and other malicious content

6. Spoof of unauthorized profiles

7. Corporate account hacking
   

For SIX, the consequences of not adequately protecting its social media accounts against these and other threats cannot be understated. Starkly put if SIX’s financial marketplace goes down because of a security issue or cyberattack, the whole Swiss financial marketplace goes down. And fake news can adversely affect stock values and cost billions of dollars, not to mention damage to reputations.

After an audit, SIX found that its existing social media management platform wasn’t efficient or scalable enough for an organization that prides itself on a reputation for reliability, security, and quality. 

SIX chose to work with Hootsuite Enterprise, and made Hootsuite the compliance hub for social media. They quickly set about addressing issues they had found during their audit, including:

1. Gain the ability to identify and delete unauthorized profiles, such as someone pretending to work for the company or an employee posting about the company

2. Make it easier to regulate access to social media accounts

3. Establish clear social media workflow and content approval processes

4. Help their social team more efficiently monitor relevant conversations on social media 

After an audit of official and unofficial accounts, SIX closed 80 unofficial accounts—including dozens of fake Facebook accounts.

SIX rolled out Hootsuite across four departments, setting up workflows for approvals and crisis management, and providing support to help teams identify potentially damaging fraud. Social media team members can now assign tasks within the four departments if they see important social media conversations or content that need to be addressed. If necessary, the team can use Hootsuite to engage in these conversations. Everyone has full visibility of what’s going on in the dashboard at all times. For SIX, a major benefit of using Hootsuite was the ability to integrate two powerful security and brand monitoring tools—ZeroFOX and Brandwatch—to proactively monitor social media account security.

ZeroFox enables SIX to quickly identify and remove non-compliant, fake, or otherwise potentially damaging content. The integration within Hootsuite allows members of the SIX social team to see a feed of ZeroFOX alerts within their Hootsuite dashboard. ZeroFOX proactively searches for fake SIX account profiles, and warns SIX if any of their existing profiles have been hacked, changed, or misused.

Because ZeroFOX has special relationships with all major social networks, it’s easy for SIX to request to take down a malicious message or fake profile with the click of a button
in the Hootsuite dashboard—and ZeroFOX does the rest.

SIX now saves valuable time and resources by automating what was previously a time-intensive manual task, freeing up valuable resources they can allocate elsewhere.

SIX recognized early on that providing the right training and ongoing support would be key to the success of their new social media management platform rollout.

The onboarding phase for Hootsuite Enterprise included web-based end-user and admin training sessions, as well as interactive practical training led by the Hootsuite team at the SIX offices in Zurich. ZeroFOX also participated in the on-site kick-off for this partnership and delivered further training to help the SIX team protect the company brand and their clients on social. This included security best practices for keeping both corporate and employee social media accounts safe from cybercriminals and scammers.

Brandwatch and ZeroFOX also ran focused web-based training sessions around how to best use their tools. The SIX team now offers ongoing internal training, including video training on social media guidelines.

When it came to brand protection, SIX had three main social media goals that influenced their thinking around platform partner selection and what they needed to do to stay secure on social:

1. Build and maintain brand awareness and credibility

2. Avoid social PR crises

3. Quickly and effectively resolve customer service issues

Integrating ZeroFOX and Brandwatch within the Hootsuite Enterprise platform gave SIX the protection they needed. SIX social team members across various departments now see the same ZeroFOX and Brandwatch streams in Hootsuite, allowing them to keep on top of potential threats at all times.