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IE Devs Criticize Bank Security Vulnerabilities
mrcaseyj writes "A post on the IE blog criticizes some banks for no longer using secure connections for entire login pages and only encrypting the password as it goes back to the bank. This prevents simple password sniffing but doesn't prevent a man in the middle attack from replacing the unsecured login page with one that has disabled encryption. This is especially a problem if you are using an unencrypted wireless connection such as at a coffee shop, because hackers can easily use the airpwn package to intercept the login page and steal your password. An easy remedy for when a secure page isn't available is to enter a bad username and password which usually brings up a secure page telling you to try again. But can you really trust your money to a bank that doesn't even offer the option of a secure login page?"
The entire session should be secured. Bank account numbers, credit card numbers, transaction histories, information about billers and automatic withdraw dates etc. are easily sniffed.
Just because they can't get your password doesn't mean they can't get useful information about you. Sniffing out an online banking session could be a big jackpot for an identity thief.
Personally, I wouldn't trust any bank whose security system relies on user supplied credentials. Any bank that does not supply its customers with an electronic hardware-based security token is not trustworthy enough to handle my savings.
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Published Wednesday, April 20, 2005 6:44 PM by ieblog
Two thousand and five.
Surely anyone who logs onto their bank site from a wireless connection in a coffee shop is just asking to get owned?
Why? SSL protects you from MITM attacks and provides strong encryption & authentication.
That is exactly what SSL is for, to protect you from sniffers/spoofers between you and the website.
Surely anyone who logs onto their bank site from a wireless connection in a coffee shop is just asking to get owned?
Not really - this is the whole point of SSL. If you trust both endpoints, you don't much care about what's in the middle.
Now, if you'd said "anyone who logs into their bank site from a random Internet cafe PC is just asking to get owned", I'd agree. It wouldn't require a great deal of sophistication to install keyloggers on every PC. Or if you're rather more sophisticated, you could set up some sort of proxy which sets up a MITM with every HTTPS session, presenting a self-signed certificate for $BANK and configure the client PC's with the appropriate certificate from the proxy's root CA.
Yes, because I'd much rather push my bank password through several other user's machines than to have my ISP route directly to the site. Tor is for anonymity, not data security.
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If Apache made 70% of the webservers in the world, they would also likely be the most hacked webserver in the world ... Oh wait -- they do make 70% of the webservers in the world. Your metaphor fails.
So back to the obvious explanation: the IE team can't code for shit