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Lloyds TSB Pushing New Online Security Protocol
An anonymous reader writes "Looks like the two-factor bandwagon is beginning to roll in UK banking. The BBC is reporting that Lloyds TSB is issuing hard-tokens to 30,000 customers in an attempt to curtail phishing." From the article: "Until now, Lloyds TSB has used a two-stage system for identifying its customers. First, users must enter a username and password. Then, on a second screen, they are asked to use drop-down menus to choose three letters from a self-chosen memorable piece of information. The aim of using menus rather than the keyboard has been to defeat so-called 'keyloggers', tiny bits of software which can be used by hackers who have breached a PC's security to read every key pressed and thus sniff out passwords. But newer keyloggers now also take screenshots, which can reveal the entire memorable word after the bank's website has been used just a few times."
As always, it's a shame that people with the cleverness and skill to devise new phishing tricks don't opt for the lower income and increased job security and satisfaction of being useful, instead of being destructive pricks whose only long-term result is making everyone else's life more difficult.
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Any step that is taken to isolate a feature of online security from your PC is going to make it more secure. It'll probably inconvenience people in a lot of situations though- say you're abroad and you've had your bags & wallet stolen, including your hard key. You won't be able to access your online account to get money transferred locally etc. Still, sounds good to me :o)
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Your RSA issued token access has officially been revoked due to security concerns. Please mail the token to the address below along with your account number.
Regards,
Bank President
During my tenure, we were issued hardware tokens that had our individual cert on it, and we could use the cert for any number of things (such as email authentication, email signing, logging into online banking, encrypting and storing documents using an electronic vault, etc). But it was also inconvenient as we had to be using a machine that could read and utilize the USB token.
If you had physical access to someone's hardware token, it wasn't difficult to use it to pretend you were someone else. End users select very week passwords, usually have the passwords to their tokens written down on post-it notes stuck to their screen or on their desk, and people in general are just too trusting.
As other posters have mentioned, you could ask a end user to USPS their hardware token to you with their password and all other relevent information, and many end users would probably do it without question.
Why hasn't digital certificates become more mainstream? Its still too inconvenient in many cases, and, it doesn't fix the weakest link - the end user.
People today demand convenience, and having to carry around a physical hardware token to do things on-line just is not convenient, especially when you find yourself in front of a computer that doesn't have USB, doesn't know how to read the USB token, or doesn't have the appropiate software to utilize the hardware token in the first place.