Identity Theft News

Researchers: banks need better security

Monday, December 22, 2008

Thanks to an earlier Trojan attack on Firefox users that attempted to steal online-banking passwords, some are suggesting financial institutions such as Bank of America and Chase need a more security on their websites.

Analysts at Gartner, a security consulting firm, said they think cybercriminals will use a previous malicious code and improve on it to access online bank accounts, Information Security magazine reports.

This refers to a report earlier this month of a Trojan that was disguised as Mozilla Firefox plug-in, first reported on December 3rd. The malicious program was activated each time a user opened the browser and sent banking login information to a server located in Russia.

"Many banks aren't employing a layered security approach that consists of stronger user authentication, fraud detection (and user behavior modeling) and out-of-band transaction verification. Layered security would prevent criminals from using harvested data to compromise accounts," wrote the analysts in a recent report.

In an effort to inform users quickly, Gartner also suggests bank CIOs send out email or text alerts to customers to inform them of security breaches or vulnerabilities, the magazine reports.ADNFCR-1765-ID-18941983-ADNFCR

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