Guidance

Third-party risk is the most clicked-on topic in FINRA's 2025 Regulatory Oversight Report. But what is third-party risk and why are people so interested in it? What can FINRA member firms do to mitigate that risk? And how can FINRA help? These questions will be answered on the latest episode of FINRA Unscripted, featuring a returning guest, FINRA's Executive Vice President of Member Supervision Greg Ruppert.

FINRA member firms should be aware of a technique threat actors use to avoid network defenders detecting the required communications of malware. On April 3, 2025, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre (ASD’s ACSC), Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (CCCS) and New Zealand National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ) issued a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA) to warn organizations of the ongoing threat of one such technique: fast flux.

FINRA created a quick reference guide to help firm users review and understand RSL indicators and dates in various scenarios in the FINRA Gateway Profiles application and FINRA Gateway Reports.

Member firms should be aware of an alleged large-scale data breach possibly affecting Oracle Cloud services at firms and third-party providers. FINRA recommends that firms review this information to assess any potential impact to their operations, as well as with third-party providers who provide services to the firm. FINRA previously delivered an email to firms whose domain names appeared in the threat actor post, as well as any firms that previously informed FINRA of their use of Oracle products and services.

This month, we are marking the 10th anniversary of the FINRA Securities Helpline for Seniors—an important milestone for a critical service that FINRA provides to protect vulnerable investors and assist harmed investors. On this FINRA Unscripted podcast episode, we will be speaking with leaders from FINRA’s Vulnerable Adults and Seniors Team—Elizabeth Yoka, the manager of VAST Intake, and Michael Paskin, the manager of the VAST Investigations, to discuss the Helpline and its 10 years of protecting investors.

Request for TRACE Reporting Exemption Under FINRA Rule 6732

As of March 14, 2025, Texas’ and Washington’s Form BR settings were updated to reflect that they now accept Residential Supervisory Locations.

Member firms should be aware of an ongoing phishing campaign involving fraudulent emails targeting executives and purporting to be from FINRA employees, with the goal of harvesting credentials. As indicated by the full, expanded email address hidden under a masked email display name, these emails are not from FINRA, and firms should delete them and consider blocking the fraudulent domains.

Firms could be vulnerable to a newly discovered social engineering scheme in which bad actors trick customer support personnel into downloading and executing malware. This Alert describes the scheme and provides recommendations to help firms protect themselves from the threat.

The Cyber and Analytics Unit (CAU) within FINRA’s Member Supervision program is highlighting recent updates to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0, which is a resource designed to help organizations manage and reduce cybersecurity risks, regardless of their degree of cybersecurity sophistication.

As we observe National Consumer Protection Week amid a changing financial fraud landscape, the time is ripe to talk about the ways in which investors can protect themselves from scams. On this episode, a member of the FINRA Investor Education Foundation team joins us to talk about how we can all become more informed and vigilant in today's complex financial world.

As the financial industry continues to evolve, it's important to stay ahead of emerging risks and trends. On this episode of FINRA Unscripted, we sit down with the leaders of FINRA's new Strategic Intelligence and Analytics team to discuss how they are working to identify and analyze these industry developments.

The 2025 FINRA Annual Regulatory Oversight Report (the Report) provides member firms with insight into findings from the recent oversight activities of FINRA’s Member Supervision, Market Regulation and Enforcement programs (collectively, regulatory operations programs).

As a self-regulatory organization, information sharing is key to FINRA's pursuit of its mission of investor protection and market integrity. The 2025 FINRA Regulatory Oversight Report provides just that. On this episode, FINRA’s regulatory leaders join us to discuss key takeaways from the report.

With a new year come new financial challenges, resolutions, and investment risks. On this episode, FINRA’s Head of Investor Education shares insights on leveraging market trends and tools to achieve your money goals in 2025.

Behind every market transaction lies a wealth of data. But how can we harness this information? On this episode, members of the Market Regulation and Transparency Services team discuss periodic aggregate market data sets, including some new data recently added to FINRA's website, and how FINRA makes this information available to the public.

In 2022, FINRA developed an enterprise-wide strategy to ensure preparation for an evolving crypto asset regulatory landscape with the creation of the Crypto Hub, the Blockchain Lab and the Crypto Asset Investigations Team. On this episode, which originally aired in August 2023, we learn more about the strategy and the role of the Hub.

Learn how to submit a Form BR amendment related to the Residential Supervisory Location (RSL) rule. In this short video (2:02 minutes), FINRA demonstrates a scenario for an existing branch that was previously filed with FINRA, the NYSE, and a state, but is now an RSL for FINRA and the NYSE, but not with the state.

Learn how to use the Non-registered Locations with RSL Status report template available in FINRA Gateway by watching this short video (2:23 minutes). The report template can be used to identify associated persons’ office of employment addresses marked as non-registered, private residences with outstanding “Yes” or “No” responses.

Learn how to amend a Form U4 filing to complete the RSL Question by watching this short (2:04 minutes) video.

FINRA prepared this quick reference guide to help firms that have identified a location as a non-registered private residence to answer the RSL question on Form U4.

In the securities world today, there is little daylight between money laundering and fraud. On this episode, we learn how FINRA’s Special Investigations Unit works to detect and investigate cases of illicit finance and market abuse, as well as how they proactively identify and mitigate threats.

Companies that use Fortinet’s FortiManager product could be exposed to a remote, unauthenticated attacker executing arbitrary code or commands due to a critical product vulnerability (CVE-2024-47575), according to two recent alerts from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).