When DDoS Attacks Strike, Real-Time Communication Powers Resilience for Financial Firms
Imagine a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack takes a major European financial services firm’s payment systems offline. As a result, the firm’s operations grind to a halt as customers are unable to make digital payments until the incident is resolved.
In a region that’s rapidly shifting toward a cashless economy, outages like this are more than just an inconvenience. They’re critical failures that put the operation at risk. In Norway, for example, the central bank of Norway reports that as much as 97% of all payments are now cashless. In environments like these, downtime simply isn’t an option.
When attacks hit, the question isn’t, “Where’s the dashboard?” it’s, “How do we coordinate?” During the first 30 minutes of the golden hour, every second counts; how the organization responds can determine whether they contain a threat — or are forced to watch it grow into a full-blown crisis.
Keep reading to learn more about the common mistakes incident response teams make during the immediate aftermath of an attack, how an out-of-band communication solution can help organizations rapidly recover from incidents, and why financial services organizations in the Nordic region in particular need to prioritize speed, focus, and adaptability as core pillars of their resilience strategy.
The First 30 Minutes: What Incident Response Teams Get Wrong
According to Radware’s 2025 Global Threat Analysis Report, the frequency of DDoS attacks is exploding, increasing a whopping 550% year over year. With threats growing at this pace, it’s no longer a question of whether your organization will be targeted but when.
And when that moment comes, it often plays out the same way: It’s a normal workday until suddenly it isn’t. One moment everything is running smoothly; the next, attacks breach your network and trigger a cascade of failures. Your cloud-based SaaS collaboration tools — think Slack and Teams — become inaccessible as your infrastructure collapses. While this is happening, your single sign-on (SSO) system fails, locking teams out of the critical platforms they rely on to communicate, coordinate, and respond.
Making matters worse, without battle-tested incident response plans in place, there’s confusion about roles, authority, and process. This only drags the response out longer — making it that much harder, if not altogether impossible, to follow the widely recognized 1:10:60 benchmark: detect an incident in one minute, investigate in 10, and contain in 60. Every lost minute increases the likelihood of lasting damage.
The solution? Deploying a communication layer that’s completely isolated from your primary infrastructure. With an out-of-band communications system in place, your teams can stay connected and coordinated — even when your main systems are compromised — giving you the confidence and resilience to respond rapidly to breaches, no matter the circumstances.
Out-of-Band Collaboration: What It Is and Why It Matters
An out-of-band (OOB) collaboration solution is an isolated system that teams rely on when primary communication methods — like email, Slack, and Microsoft Teams — go down during an incident. Unlike ad hoc fallbacks like SMS or consumer messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, OOB systems are secure by design and purpose-built to help teams navigate worst-case scenarios.
As a secure collaboration platform engineered for high-security and even classified environments, Mattermost is an ideal out-of-band collaboration solution for financial services organizations.
With Mattermost as your mission-critical collaboration solution, teams can stay connected and coordinated when traditional systems get knocked offline or are compromised or untrusted — all without having to rely on the infrastructure that’s under attack.
A resilient OOB architecture typically includes these key components:
- A secondary identity provider (IDP) to authenticate users independently;
- A VPN or secure jumpbox for controlled access;
- DNS failover to redirect traffic if primary domains are impacted; and
- A tested backup and restore path to ensure operational continuity.
Together, these components create a hardened communication lifeline that keeps teams aligned when it matters most.
When the stakes are highest and every second counts, out-of-band collaboration isn’t a backup plan — it’s your first line of defense.
How Financial Services Firms Can Prepare for the Next Attack
When systems go down, it’s too late to start provisioning new resources. To minimize damages and keep bad actors at bay, financial services firms need to pre-build critical components of their out-of-band communication strategy. That way, when disruption strikes, security teams can respond immediately and decisively.
To strengthen your incident response capabilities, here’s what you’ll need to prepare in advance:
- Build a parallel identity path by using a secondary IDP to ensure authentication works even if your primary SSO system is compromised.
- Provision secure access roles ahead of time for key personnel across cybersecurity, incident response, legal, and the C-suite.
- Preload essential teams and channels into the OOB platform; don’t wait until an incident occurs to figure out who needs access. Remember, every second counts.
- Run quarterly failover drills to validate your team’s readiness; tabletop exercises and static runbooks aren’t enough.
- Automate backup and recovery workflows to minimize downtime and human error caused by pressure.
Whether deployed in a hardened AWS environment with Route 53 failover or a fully isolated Azure subscription using Traffic Manager and AKS, Mattermost supports secure, auditable OOB collaboration architectures. With air-gapped deployment options, detailed audit trails, and alignment with compliance standards, financial services firms can build confidence alongside capability while fortifying their defenses.
Why OOB Is More Important for Financial Services in Highly Digital Economies
In highly digital economies like Denmark, Sweden, and Norway — where only 3% to 10% of transactions are made in cash — banks, retailers, and payment infrastructure are tightly interconnected. A failure in one part of the system can quickly ripple across the entire network.
With little to no paper-based failback in place, downtime is more than an inconvenience — it’s a mission-critical failure. And as cyberattacks grow more frequent and sophisticated, the stakes for financial services providers in the Nordics have never been higher.
To protect against the existential threat of being unable to serve their customers during a disruption, financial services organizations need to prioritize OOB collaboration. After all, when payment systems go down, communications systems can’t go with them.
By deploying an OOB communication solution, organizations can ensure there’s always a secure, trusted way for teams to stay connected — no matter what systems get knocked offline.
Organizational Resilience Starts with Communication
As cyberattacks become more common, it’s only a matter of time before bad actors put your organization in their crosshairs. Don’t wait until that happens to learn the hard way that Slack, Teams, or emails are absolutely not reliable fallback options during such scenarios.
When systems go down, communication is the first and most essential capability you need to preserve. Yet far too often, it’s one of the last systems to be decoupled from vulnerable infrastructure.
Resilient organizations know that incident response begins with communication. That’s why most forward-thinking organizations treat communication as a mission-critical asset — not a nice to have.
When it boils down to it, your out-of-band system is the first system you should harden. Because when every second counts, your team can’t afford to only hear silence.
To learn more about what resilient incident response teams are doing to prepare for the next attack, read our Mission-Critical Collaboration brief.
