Banco Galicia

Protecting DataWhile AI Reshapes Cybersecurity: A Banking Perspective

The Challenge

Banco Galicia is one of Argentina’s largest private banks, with a nationwide footprint and a strong focus on digital banking and innovation. As cloud adoption accelerated and AI tools became embedded across the organization, the bank’s attack surface expanded rapidly.

The cybersecurity team faced two converging risks:

• Data exposure through generative AI. Employees could unknowingly upload sensitive banking data into third-party AI tools, potentially allowing models to learn from information that was never meant to leave the organization.
• AI-specific attack techniques. Internally deployed AI systems introduced new risks, such as prompt injection, where attackers manipulate AI to access data or compromise infrastructure.

“In today’s environment, you are one click away from your data being exposed,” explains David Vinograd. Protecting sensitive financial data while enabling innovation became the defining security challenge for his team.

Security as a business enabler

At Banco Galicia, cybersecurity is not viewed as a constraint on the business. It is the foundation that allows the bank to innovate, launch new digital products, and maintain customer trust in a tightly regulated industry.

“All the security controls we apply give the business the confidence to keep evolving,” says Vinograd. Without that foundation, regulatory standing is put at risk, customer trust erodes, and product development slows. In Argentine banking, these risks are immediate and non-negotiable.

Why Darktrace

When evaluating security partners, Banco Galicia applied strict criteria:

• Proven experience in financial services
• Local or near-local presence
• Claims that could be validated through real-world testing

“Every promise has to be proven in a proof of concept,” Vinograd notes. In a sector where failure carries regulatory and reputational consequences, the bank could not afford tools that performed well in sales conversations but fell short in production.

Darktrace met those requirements. Today, Banco Galicia uses the Darktrace ActiveAI Security PlatformTM, with coverage across network, email, cloud, identity, and endpoint environments.

Restoring full network visibility

Before deploying Darktrace / NETWORK™, the security team had monitoring tools in place, but lacked a complete, unified view of activity across the environment.

“Darktrace gives us visibility over our network that no other solution had given us before,” Vinograd explains. Using self-learning AI, the platform identified anomalous behaviors that previously went undetected, while maintaining a very low false-positive rate.

In one instance, Darktrace detected activity closely resembling ransomware and large-scale port scanning. While investigation confirmed the behavior was caused by legitimate internal processes acting abnormally, the detections themselves were accurate.

“That gave us certainty,” Vinograd says. “If a real attack happens tomorrow, we know we will be able to detect it.”

Catching sophisticated email threats

Email security presented a parallel challenge. Highly targeted phishing attacks were bypassing native email protections and reaching employee inboxes.

With Darktrace / EMAIL™, Banco Galicia began detecting advanced phishing attempts that existing tools consistently missed.

“We were able to detect sophisticated phishing attacks that we simply weren’t catching before,” says Vinograd. Beyond phishing, the platform surfaced a broader range of email-based threats, with a low false-positive rate that allowed the team to trust and act on alerts quickly.

A focus on prevention

For Banco Galicia, success is not measured by how quickly incidents are resolved, but by how many are prevented entirely. That requires security technology that continuously learns the organization’s normal behavior, detects threats early, and enables action before damage occurs.

In an industry where customer trust is the product and regulatory obligations are uncompromising, Banco Galicia relies on Darktrace to stay ahead of an evolving threat landscape—and to ensure security remains the engine, not the obstacle, of innovation.

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