Online Banking Security @ Risk

The growth for Online Banking within the South African market has been phenomenal. It was reported by Edwin Naidu that 2,4 million people were using online banking in the year 2008.

Amongst the four large banks (First National Bank, ABSA, Standard Bank and Nedbank); the South African consumers have continuously provided support and loyalty to these financial institutions without fully understanding the risks that they are exposing their money to when transacting on the internet.

However, little do consumers know that 2011 is a year where we saw the fall of internet security due to the following security breaches:

• The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) was compromised by a prototype called BEAST as reported by Anup K. Ghosh

• Jeff Hudson has reported that five Certificate Authorities (CA) were also compromised this year. These CA are as follows:

• Stuxnet

• Comodo

• STratSSL

• Diginotar

• DuQu

• The two-factor authentication used by RSA security was also compromised. This resulted in the loss of the secrets used to generate the one-time passwords

• During the month of September 2011, the number of online fraud reached an all-time high of 38 970 attacks – South Africa is one of the top five countries in terms of phishing attack volumes, according to RSA, Monthly Fraud Report.

The diagram below shows that South Africa is the third highest country which is being targeted for online fraud:

So word of advice this festive season: Be careful who you bank with because you may be one of 38 970 phishing victims!!!