Banks Big And Small Targets of Cyber Gangs
Brilliance historically is often expressed in the simplest of technologies, the wheel or the light bulb are perfect examples. Today brilliance is often attributed to advances in technologies that cure illness, solve problems and make life easier.
In the past decade coders, programmers and hackers of all kinds are coming up with the simplest to the most brilliant inventions transforming life as we know it. And unfortunately it’s the criminal hackers that seem to be the smartest in the room.
CIO spoke to how “ZeuS, SpyEye, Sunspot, OddJob, Gameover. Villains in the next James Bond movie? No. These are names for sophisticated and dangerous crimeware used by real villains – internationally organized gangs of cyber criminals – to hijack online bank accounts and steal money.”
They further state “The Anti-Phishing Working Group estimates that 45% of all computers are now infected with software designed to steal money.”
When banks began building out their infrastructure to allow for online banking, they didn’t anticipate the thousands of ways in which the bad guy would scheme and come up with brilliant ways to separate banks and their clients from their cash.
A Texas bank sued one of its customers who was hit by an $800,000 online bank theft to determine who is to be held responsible for protecting their online accounts from fraud.
Now the FFIEC has stepped in telling banks to smarten up and enhance their online banking security. Effective this past January banks must use multi layers of security and educate their clients on security risks.
That includes sophisticated methods of identifying devices and knowing their reputation (past and current behavior and other devices they are associated with) the moment they touch the banking website. The FFIEC has recognized complex device identification strategies as a viable solution that’s already proven strong at very large financial institutions. ReputationManager360 by iovation leads the charge with device reputation encompassing identification and builds on device recognition with real-time risk assessment, uniquely leveraging both the attributes and the behavior of the device.
Consumers must protect themselves by updating their devices operating systems critical security patches, antivirus, antispyware, antiphishing and firewall. It is also critical they use a secure, encrypted wireless internet connection.
Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation. He is the author of 99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Mobile was Hacked! See him knock’em dead in this identity theft prevention video. Disclosures.
