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…
For a long, long, long, long, long, long time, I’ve talked about biometrics taking off in banking … and it hasn’t. The biometrics market has picked up and tailed off in fits and starts, but there is no real mainstream biometric program out there that I’ve spotted to date. The nearest I got was some…
For a long, long, long, long, long, long time, I’ve talked about biometrics taking off in banking … and it hasn’t. The biometrics market has picked up and tailed off in fits and starts, but there is no real mainstream biometric program out there that I’ve spotted to date. The nearest I got was some…
No, not the state benefits version, but the online version. I've been blogging a lot lately about cybercrime, identity theft and the do's and dont's of social networking. This was in part due to a seminar that took place this week where we were debating the risks related to social networking and mobile finance. There is…
Banks miss a trick in not advising customers how to network socially with safety, so here’s my top do’s and don’ts for social networking. It’s not exhaustive, but just those that are top of mind and banks would do well to send such advice to their customers in writing, online and always when they logon…
