Industry
Offensive Security built for UK Financial Services.
Banks, fintechs, insurers and financial institutions hold what attackers want most: money, customer data and the systems that move both. The Swarm attacks your whole organisation the way they would, across digital, social and physical vectors, so you know what holds before they find out. CBEST and STAR-FS accredited.
THE THREAT.
What would an attacker take from you first?
Few sectors are tested as often as yours. Regulators, auditors, pen testers and your own teams all report what they found inside the scope they were given. None of them tell you what a motivated attacker would take, or how fast.
When it goes wrong in financial services, it goes wrong in public. Money leaves accounts, customers lose access to theirs, and your regulator asks whether you stayed within impact tolerance. Your board doesn’t need another report; it needs proof of where you really stand.
They want to move money.
Payment flows, account takeover, a changed bank detail on a supplier invoice. Attackers go where the payout is, and one approved transfer is enough.
They want your data.
Customer records, credentials, deal information. It gets sold, used for fraud or held to ransom, and every record brings a notification, a regulator and a headline.
They want you offline.
Payments, trading, and online banking are services your customers cannot go without. Take them down, and the question becomes whether you stayed within impact tolerance.
We attack the paths to your crown jewels.
Real attackers don’t pick a system and stop. They chain a service desk call, a misconfigured API and a forgotten admin account until they reach the thing that pays. The Swarm works the same way.
Payments and core systems
Core banking APIs, payment rails, trading and settlement platforms. We test whether an attacker who gets inside can change where money goes, and whether anyone would notice.
Customer-facing apps and APIs
Mobile banking, online portals, onboarding and login flows. We go after session handling, access controls and API logic, the routes to account takeover and fraud at scale.
Cloud and infrastructure
Cloud tenancies, identity and access, internal networks. We look for the misconfiguration or excess privilege that turns one foothold into the whole estate.
People and processes
Service desks, onboarding, payment approvals, executive assistants. We test the moment someone decides to trust a caller, an email or a request that looks routine.
Branches, offices and data centres
Front doors, server rooms, badge readers and the staff who hold doors open. We test whether someone can walk in, plug in and walk out.
Suppliers and partners
Fintech integrations, outsourced providers and the shared access that comes with them. We test the routes into your organisation that run through someone else’s.
We know that real attack surfaces don’t come in neat categories. If yours doesn’t fit above, tell us what you’re working with.
The only way to be confident is to face a real attacker.
We become the threat. CovertSwarm gives your bank, building society, fintech or payments firm a team of elite ethical hackers, augmented by agentic tools, that thinks, acts and strikes like a real attacker.
Your Swarm attacks your firm using digital, physical and social methods. We find, chain and exploit weaknesses in your Faster Payments and CHAPS flows, customer accounts and supplier access before a real attacker does. Then we show you how to fix them.
You’ll know exactly where you stand, with proof for your board, your regulators and yourself. Over 100 security leaders subscribe to CovertSwarm.
Are you ready? Let’s find out.
Constant pressure.
We attack every route to your crown jewels: a call to your service desk, a stranger at a branch door, a weak mobile banking app. Like a real attacker, we stay fixed on an objective, all within safe boundaries agreed in your Attack Thesis.
Continuous attack cycles. No fixed scopes.
Suppliers, products and staff change between formal pen tests. Our attacks run in cycles, not on a fixed schedule, and keep pace. So does your evidence: proof of what held and what broke, every cycle, not one report a year. We're accredited to deliver CBEST and STAR-FS testing.
Human experts, augmented by AI.
The Swarm is a team of elite ethical hackers, each with unique skills. Agentic tools map your endpoints, open banking APIs and third-party connections fast, so humans spend their time chaining weaknesses. You get direct access to the team attacking your brand via Slack.
How it works for financial services
Your subscription starts with your Attack Thesis: what matters most, and what adversaries would target first.
It starts with what an attacker would want from you: the payment approval chain, the customer onboarding flow, the trading platform, the board pack.
We agree the objectives and guardrails before anything runs.
Recon
We gather intelligence about your organisation, and prepare to attack key objectives, using both open-source and agentic methods.
New assets enter scope as they emerge.
Qualified findings, not a stream of alerts.
Last cycle's findings direct the next.
OSINT + Agentic reconnaissance
Attack
Based on intelligence or strategic goals, we build and execute custom Attack Plans. We chain weaknesses and exploit every route.
Custom built plans target your actual risk
Chained across digital, physical and social
Led by humans with agentic capability
Point the Swarm at your priorities
Remediate
We notify your team about discovered risks in real-time and provide guided remediation. Get evidence of what held, and what needs work.
You're notified while the risk is live
Guidance in Slack and Jira
Findings inform the next attack cycle
Direct access to the Swarm
Which weakness would we discover first within your organisation?
What a Finding Looks Like
Example: Fintech onboarding finding
Critical
Finding
Starting from a standard employee laptop, a Swarm operator used predictable email formats and a shared temporary onboarding password to map more than 300 accounts and log in to an inactive admin account.
Impact
Over 90% of employee passwords cracked. A routine onboarding shortcut became a route to control of the whole company.
Remediation
Issue unique, expiring temporary passwords with a forced change at first login, and remove dormant admin accounts.
Board impact
A new-starter process, not a technology failure, opened the door. No single control was broken; together they gave an attacker the company.
Technical impact
A predictable username format let the operator enumerate 300+ accounts, then password-spray the shared onboarding default. A dormant admin account still accepted it. Admin access exposed stored password hashes, and over 90% were cracked offline.
Want the full picture?
The full range of offensive security the Swarm runs: every discipline, how they connect, and what each one tests.
No form fill required.
REGULATED TESTING, DELIVERED BY AN ATTACKER.
Regulators and auditors want more than "we tested last year." They want to see that you know your risk and act on it. Every Swarm cycle produces board-ready evidence of what was attacked, what held and what was fixed, in a record that builds over the year.
The Swarm is CREST accredited, a standard your auditors recognise. We're accredited to deliver CBEST and STAR-FS testing. Your programme gets the same rigour every cycle, not once a year.
| Obligation | What it asks for | How the Swarm supports it |
|---|---|---|
| CBEST & STAR-FS | Intelligence-led, threat-based testing of the systems that support your most important services, run by accredited providers. | Complements your formal threat-led test. Between tests, continuous attack evidence shows how your defences hold against realistic adversary behaviour. |
| PRA and FCA operational resilience | Firms identify their important business services, set impact tolerances and test that they can stay within them in severe but plausible scenarios. | Attack paths toward your important business services, tested every cycle. Dated evidence for your board and senior managers. |
| DORA (firms with EU operations) | Digital operational resilience testing for in-scope EU entities, including threat-led penetration testing for some. | Continuous offensive evidence that supports your wider resilience testing programme. It doesn't replace a formal DORA test. |
| PCI DSS | Penetration testing of the cardholder data environment. | Attack paths toward payment data tested every cycle, alongside your formal PCI DSS test. |
| UK GDPR and ICO breach notification | Appropriate technical and organisational measures, including regular testing of their effectiveness. Qualifying personal data breaches reported to the ICO within 72 hours. | Evidence that you attack your own controls regularly, and findings your team has already fixed. |
| ISO 27001 and SOC 2 | Evidence of control testing for audits. | Dated, cycle-by-cycle findings and remediation. |
CBEST and STAR-FS show how you held up at one point in time. Constant Cyber Attack™ keeps the pressure on between them, so you go into your next regulated test already knowing what an attacker would find.
Stories from the Swarm
These stories are real, but the names are deeply redacted. We'll tell you how we uncovered the threats no one else could see, and why constant cyber attack is the best way to outpace cyber threats.
Become a story well told. Contact us to discuss how Constant Cyber Attack will help you outpace cyber threats.
Frequently Asked Questions
Both are intelligence-led testing frameworks for UK financial services, but CBEST is for systemically important firms, with heavy regulator involvement and longer timelines. STAR-FS is the firm-led alternative, with the same threat emulation and less regulatory overhead.
A CBEST engagement is threat-led testing set by UK regulators for systemically important institutions, simulating the attacks most likely to target you. It involves a threat intelligence provider, a red team such as CovertSwarm and the tested firm, and tests detection and response rather than just finding vulnerabilities.
There's no single UK rule setting one frequency for every firm. What the regulators require is proof that you can withstand disruption. Since 31 March 2025, firms in scope of the PRA and FCA rules must be able to stay within impact tolerance for each important business service in a severe but plausible disruption, which means testing often enough to show it. CBEST and STAR-FS cycles are set with the regulator. Firms with EU operations that are designated under DORA must run threat-led penetration testing at least every three years. Attackers keep to none of these timetables, which is why more firms now test continuously in between.
It fills the time between regulated tests. Constant Cyber Attack keeps realistic pressure on your organisation all year, so you enter your next CBEST or STAR-FS engagement already knowing what an attacker would find.
No. Every attack runs within guardrails agreed in your Attack Thesis, and services your customers depend on are protected from disruption.
All three. The Swarm attacks digital, social and physical routes, because real attackers move between a phishing email, a service desk call and an unlocked door.
Looking for something specific?
Talk to us. We'd love to hear from you.
Stop testing.
Start knowing.
You'll know exactly where you stand, and you'll be able to prove it. To your board, your regulator, and yourself.
Transform to a proactive, continuous offensive security programme
Your budget is aimed at the risk that matters, not the one you were handed
You show the board what security prevented, not a request for more
Security clears the way for the business to move faster
You enter the boardroom in command
It starts with a 30-minute Attack Discovery call.
No access to your systems required.