Ask most Cyprus businesses which sectors get cybersecurity scrutiny from regulators, and the answer is almost always “banks and investment firms.” That’s no longer accurate. Between MiCA, the National Betting Authority’s licensing regime, IMO shipping requirements, and the Central Bank of Cyprus’s oversight of electronic money institutions, several sectors that used to sit outside financial regulation are now squarely inside it, and their security testing needs are different from a CIF’s in ways generic pentest scoping tends to miss.
Crypto platforms: MiCA made Cyprus a CASP hub
MiCA has been fully applicable across the EU since December 2024, and Cyprus, already home to a large CIF and forex sector, has become one of the more active jurisdictions for Crypto-Asset Service Provider licensing through CySEC. A CASP inherits much of the ICT risk scrutiny CySEC already applies to CIFs, but layered onto custody and key management, an attack surface a standard CIF simply doesn’t have.
Hot and cold wallet separation, private key management, and the platform’s on/off-ramp integrations all need dedicated attention that a generic web application test won’t cover. Our MiCA and CASP penetration testing service is scoped specifically around that custody layer, alongside the trading platform itself and the ICT risk documentation CySEC expects to see for licensing.
iGaming: licensed, monetised, and rarely tested to the standard its risk deserves
Cyprus’s online gaming and betting operators sit under the National Betting Authority, and the platforms themselves handle exactly the combination attackers look for: real-money transactions, KYC data, and session logic that directly controls payouts. A vulnerability in bet settlement or wallet balance logic isn’t a theoretical risk on an iGaming platform, it converts into direct financial loss the moment it’s found by the wrong person.
Despite that, iGaming platforms are frequently tested with the same generic web app checklist used for a marketing site. Game logic, RNG integrity where it’s in scope, and payment/wallet flows all need testing that understands gambling-specific abuse patterns, not just OWASP Top 10 coverage. That’s the gap our iGaming and online casino penetration testing service is built to close.
Shipping: IMO 2021 quietly made cyber risk a safety requirement
Cyprus runs one of the largest ship registries and shipmanagement hubs in the world, and since January 2021, IMO Resolution MSC.428(98) has required cyber risk to be addressed within existing Safety Management Systems under the ISM Code. That’s a meaningful shift: cyber risk on a vessel or in a fleet management system isn’t just an IT problem, it’s a safety-management compliance item that flag states and port state control can check.
Shipmanagement companies typically run a mix of shore-side IT, fleet management platforms, and increasingly connected OT on vessels themselves, three different attack surfaces that rarely get tested together. Our maritime and shipping penetration testing service covers shore-side systems and fleet management platforms with ISM Code documentation in mind, so the result is usable evidence, not just a generic report.
EMIs and CSPs: two very different obligations, both often missed
Electronic Money Institutions are licensed and supervised by the Central Bank of Cyprus, a different regulator from CySEC entirely, with its own expectations around payment platform security and, critically, the technical separation between safeguarded client funds and operational accounts. Account takeover and payment fraud tend to cause more real damage on an EMI than infrastructure-level attacks do, which is exactly what our EMI penetration testing service is weighted toward.
Corporate Service Providers and fiduciary firms face a different kind of exposure: they hold client, beneficial-ownership, and corporate structuring data that’s extremely sensitive under GDPR, often across CRM and document-management systems that were never built with that sensitivity in mind. Our CSP and fiduciary GDPR penetration testing service focuses on exactly those systems rather than a generic infrastructure scope.
The common thread
None of these sectors are edge cases anymore. Crypto, iGaming, shipping, EMIs, and CSPs are all licensed, supervised, and increasingly expected to produce technical evidence, not just policy documents, when a regulator or auditor asks for it. The testing has to match the sector’s actual risk, not a template built for a generic web application. If your business sits in one of these categories and hasn’t had a test scoped to what actually matters for it, that’s the gap worth closing first.