So I just had a meeting with a couple of heavyweights in the cybersecurity field. These guys are bank defenders, and very good at their jobs. Their mission: to keep cyberattacks to an acceptable level. Acceptable is a few basis points of total credit, let’s say under 0.7%. Fine. But it’s getting harder every day,…
The wireless world of connectivity we live in has risks, and the greatest risk has to be infection of technology. Technology viruses like trojans and man-in-the-middle look mild today, when you see the tsunami of malware that’s out there. Just a year ago, I was saying that banks should offer advice to consumer about security and…
The wireless world of connectivity we live in has risks, and the greatest risk has to be infection of technology. Technology viruses like trojans and man-in-the-middle look mild today, when you see the tsunami of malware that’s out there. Just a year ago, I was saying that banks should offer advice to consumer about security and…
We have seen a great deal of activity from the activist online community called Anonymous in the last year. They first hit my radar when they closed down the websites of PayPal, Visa and MasterCard in retaliation for the arrest of Julian Assange and closure of Wikileaks funding accounts. This resulted in a co-ordinated Distributed Denial…
We have seen a great deal of activity from the activist online community called Anonymous in the last year. They first hit my radar when they closed down the websites of PayPal, Visa and MasterCard in retaliation for the arrest of Julian Assange and closure of Wikileaks funding accounts. This resulted in a co-ordinated Distributed Denial…
Biometrics isn’t discussed that much at banking conferences these days. Most of the time, when I raise the topic, there’s a groan from the banking audience. “Oh, been there, done that.” The usual view is that biometrics doesn’t work. It’s too flakey. Too many false positives and false negatives, as in it doesn’t read the…
Talking about iris recognition and passwords recently, I got a note from Spanish Bank, Bankinter, which has just launched an app that identifies clients through iris recognition on the phone. The way it works is that customers access their brokerage accounts by blinking into their smartphone’s camera. The app has algorithms built-in that look for eye…
We had a meeting of the Financial Services Club last week that looked at fraud and mobile malware with the Serious Organised Crime Agency and the International Systems Security Association (ISSA). It was an interesting meeting, as I’m particularly intrigued by stories about mobile as this is our hot space right now. Every bank…
I regularly write about fraudulent aspects of finance, and it’s getting worse. As I say in my presentations: “with five billion points of data breach, how can you keep secure?” and this is a key question, as every mobile device is now a point of payment or sale. Equally, as everyone is loosely leaking their…
