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Hacked Bank of India Site Labeled Trustworthy
SkiifGeek writes "When the team at Sunbelt Software picked up on a sneaky hack present on the Bank of India website, it became a unique opportunity to see how anti-phishing and website trust verification tools were handling a legitimate site that had been attacked. Unfortunately, not one of the sites or tools identified that the Bank of India website was compromised and serving malware to all visitors The refresh time on a trust-brokering site is too long to be useful when a surf-by attack on a trusted site can take place in a matter of seconds, with a lifetime of hours, and with a victim base of thousands or greater."
That's the problem, how many consumers are sophisticated enough to even ask the right questions. They simply trust that their financial organization or any major web retailer has a secured site. Obviously there should be strict standards but who is going to enforce it. What authority would the agency actually have. As I have said before, there is still a lot to be said to walking into your local bank and being helped by a clerk that you see every week that you can shoot the shit with as they handle your transaction.
There are very few instances when I actually need to rdesktop in and use a Windows machine.
One of those is when I've actually got to visit one of my online banking sites, which requires some obscure activex "security" extension to work. For someone who uses FF, noscript and occasional peeks at firebug, it really pisses me off when I have to disable all my own security checks to enable a site to "secure" itself.
This is just another instance where I'd have been hit if I had been a user of the said bank (and had to use IE to browse it).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
As stated, when someone like Doubleclick, Akamai or some other cache serving company gets compromised, then I will worry about things more.
For some unknown reason, I hoped that financial institutions would have more online security than Doubleclick or Akamai.
They're useful for doing in-place file uploads without refreshing the page (e.g., in a web app like Gmail where you'd want to add an attachment to a message), because that's the only way to do that.
Anti-phishing tools shouldn't be used to determine which sites are good, they should be used to determine which sites are bad.
These tools might have picked up thousands of shoddily done, fly by night phishing scams. It doesn't reflect badly on them if one well done, sophisticated cracked server can fool them. There is still going to be errors. These tools allow people to discount the most obvious hacks, and use their time on the 1% of most dangerous hacks.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
... I would implement the one-time password sent to mobile phone which is the method my internet banking site uses: you log in with card number, customer selcted pin and password
the login page also has BIG warnings: do not click on any links (relating to your banking or purporting to be) or give your banking details to anyone on the internet or in an e-mail since the bank or it's employees will never ask for it
then when you are on your profile page, before you can do any transaction at all, the site sends an SMS to your mobile with a one-time password only after entering this password are you allowed into your main account and can start banking i.e verifying your physical presence as well as being good security measure for online banking sessions
of course you need to set all this up with your bank beforehand, but with new financial regulations in south africa you go through a long process of verifying your identity and proof of address in person in a bank each year, so from the beginning this type of scheme has robust security
this has worked very well and i need to hear of an instance of it being circumvented other than criminals holding a gun to your head while you do your banking, which puts the whole thing in another category altogether
people who get scammed by clicking on links and falling for Nigerian type fund relocation schemes only has their own stupidity and greed to blame
only my 0.02
Move along now, nothing to see here! Go on!
But that's not what anti-phishing tools are they for. They should flag fake sites, not legit sites serving spyware. Regardless of the hack, the site itself was still the Bank of India site, and not a phished site. An iframe embedded in legit source is not a phishing scam. A toolbar that only checks for URL legitimacy would be correct in not flagging the site.
Maybe the malware it dishes out only affects Windows users. But if that part of the site has been compromised, what's to say there isn't also some surreptitious logging of user credentials going on?