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Online banks: Prime targets for attacks
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Posted by: Tweaker
Late one recent Sunday night, an executive at a midsized financial services firm received the kind of call everyone in the industry dreads: a demand for $1 million, or else the brokerage's network would crash the next day with a surreptitiously installed program.
The firm's security team spent a frenzied night searching for the pernicious code but failed to find it, and the system went down for an hour in the morning. The executive's phone rang once more: The caller threatened to crash the system again, but this time during peak trading hours. The brokerage, in this case, paid up.
"We figured out how the person got in and patched the system," said Ed Skoudis, a hacking expert at security firm Predictive Systems, which was called in to fortify the company's networks. "We deal with about two intrusions per month, and we're just one of the many teams out there doing this work. We're not dealing with denial-of-service attacks or script kiddies playing around, but skilled financial intrusions."
Although electronic break-ins are nothing new, their frequency has been quietly mounting in recent years as more banks rush online to provide services for consumers who are finally using the Web in significant numbers to manage their money. The popularity of online banking is projected to grow from 22 million households in 2002 to 34 million in 2005, according to Financial Insite, publisher of the Online Banking Report newsletter.
Banks need to be very careful with how they handle customer data. This is why I don't bank online.
Story here
Source: ZDNet News
Posted by: redwench
i do bank online. basically, any info is available to hacking whether or not you do nowadays. all your information is stored on thier computer systems, regardless of whether you access it online. and i find online banking to be a great convenience.
anyway, theres a big difference between crashing a system and de-encrypting account files. the account data in the above case was never compromised. its possible to do, of course, but much more difficult and rare than a system crash.
to put it in perspective, anyone to whom you write a check knows your name, address, bank, bank account number, and possibly your phone number and ssn. they also have your signature.
just how secure do you think that is?
Posted by: Swilo
I check my balance every few days, but that's about it.
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