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Most Bank Websites Are Insecure
Anonymous writes "More than three-quarters of bank Web sites have design flaws that could expose bank customers to financial loss or identity theft, according to a University of Michigan study that will be presented this week at the Symposium on Usable Security and Privacy.
The study, 'Analyzing Web Sites For User-Visible Security Design Flaws,' examined 214 bank Web sites in 2006. It was conducted by University of Michigan computer science professor Atul Prakash and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders."
Having worked in the banking industry for nearly a decade, I was a bit skeptical. Many times we will have some security firm come in and look at our public facing web site, and come back with a list of 25-30 items that are 'security issues'. Most of them are complete crap, and maybe 1 or 2 are legitimate concerns. Management gets in a tizzy and insists that all items must be addressed, even when many items make no sense or are even counterproductive to implement.
I skimmed the underlying study (the article itself was worthless except for the link), and some of the concerns are very valid. For example, I have NO idea why a bank wouldn't insist on using SSL for any banking transaction.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Since if I enter my username (composed from my real name) and an incorrect password three times, it locks me out.
I say "my" username, but if I enter any username - easily deductible by composing any two first and last names - and an incorrect password three times... that account gets locked out.
I'm sure that nobody with malice aforethought, a dictionary of names, and a frisky Perl script will ever feel the urge to increase every customers' security by having them locked out.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Banks are protected from their mistakes by the US Federal Reserve.
Profits always get privatized, banker's mistakes often get nationalized. The private citizen always gets stuck with bailing the banks out but gets little or no benefit from profits since these shipped of to tax havens like Lichtenstein. Which makes it all the more gratifying when something like this happens.
That makes me absolutely apeshit; do NOT force me to choose one of your crappy questions! Let me write my own question, and my own answer.
Whenever I get to write my own question, the question is always a mnemonic for a password...Secure, and easy to remember, since the question implies the answer uniquely, and you don't get any "Did I abbreviate my hometown name in the 'What was the name of your high school question?'" problems.
The thing I do if they force the question, is use a stock response for all questions of that type, which is, itself, password like. E.g my first pet was: Wc@e%rddt^y, whereas my first car was" L!kj%nb^
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I have my personal bank account at Scotiabank in Canada, and I have a MasterCard credit card with another company.
On my bank's website, all I need to have is my banking card number and a password, and that's about it for the security features. If I were an average user, I could easily be fooled by a forged website reproducing my bank website and asking me for personal information. Fortunately, THERE'S A WARNING ON THE FRONT PAGE, right beside the month's special promotion and the [Contact Us] link, telling me that the bank never sends an EMail with an enclosed link to their online banking website...
On the other hand, on my credit card company website, they first asked me for a security picture and a security passphrase, and they told me at first that, whatever the page I'm on on their website, once I'm logged in, I should see both the picture and the security passphrase. Also, when I login, I have to use a username and a password, so someone who knows my credit card number could not know what username I have on the website, and they ask me for my home phone number or my city of residence or my mother's maiden name... And the only thing I could do on this website is to view my credit card statement, WITHOUT my credit card number nor any information that could lead to identity theft...
So I think my bank is WAY behind the market on the security technologies side, since someone could transfer all my money to another bank account and they only ask for two very simple informations in order to be able to do that...
I once had to cash a check at the post office. I got about 25-30 retries before they were satisfied that the signature was actualy the same as the one they had to verify against. They even held it up against the glass, so I could copy it.
Once my school said that I falsified my dads signature and they needed confirmation, so I took it home and came back with the same signature on it. The fact that they were two real ones or two fake ones they had no idea of knowing.
People unfortunatly have most of the time no real perception about security. They see it as a hinder
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This means that it's hard for any intruder to actually do something even if they are able to crack the encrypted channel between me and my bank.
The use of username/password or a non challenge/response technology are definitely insufficient since they are open for man in the middle attacks and other attacks.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I use random password like strings for the answers to those questions also. It's too easy for just about anybody who knows me to guess the correct answers to those questions. You don't even have to know me, you can just check out my facebook profile. My first highschool is obvious, because there is only 1 in my hometown.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Your viewpoint isn't so much as a generation thing as a naivety thing.
Who cares if the transaction between yourself and your bank is "100% secure" and the encryption can't be broken without 1 million years of brute force attacking - if someone has installed a keylogger on your computer and now has your username, password and whatever other stuff the bank requires you to have to log in?
Then there's the fact that these systems likely aren't 100% secure - the algorithms may work perfectly, but if the design of the system (which was created by one or more flawed humans) is faulty, then you have problems. You shouldn't be so worried about your teller making a mistake counting out your money so much as you should be worried that the teller has just slipped out $150 when you asked for $100, and pocketed the $50.
which is totally what she said
You're not thinking outside your (rather small) box. The answer is to make the account harder to guess. Let users choose their own account name, and you won't be able to guess that "SamJones" is a valid account. You could try "SammyTheMan", but at least the range of possible logins has just increased by an order of magnitude. Maybe, for those users who really have no creativity and try to insist on using FirstnameLastname, the bank could require that your login be FirstnameLastnameBirthmonthBirthday. "SamJones0413" is two-and-a-half orders of magnitude harder to guess than "SamJones".
If you did want to solve the problem of account lockout, you could try this: the first time an incorrect password happens, lock the account for 0.1 seconds. For every subsequent attempt, increase the lockout time by 10. After 3 bad guesses, you'd have to wait almost 2 minutes. After four guesses: 16 minutes. Five guesses: 2+3/4 hours. Six guesses: a day and 3 hours. Seven guesses: a week and a half. Eight guesses: 3+1/2 months. So, on the one hand, if the account does get DOS'd, it's merely "relatively" DOS'd to some extent; on the other hand, if Evil Hacker really wanted to DOS the account to a great extent, then it would be inconvenient for Evil Hacker, who might actually wait 2 minutes for the fourth guess but probably won't wait 16 minutes to enter the fifth guess. The Innocent End User, checking her account at the end of the day, might not even know that it had been semi-DOS'd.
Lots of creative ways you can solve these problems. I came up with this in the time it took me to type this post. I'm sure others have more ideas.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
A while back I emailed my bank about several critical holes on their website. Their response: because the actual banking takes place through a third-party, the access logs that are publicly available on the site, the ability to manipulate the content of the website through javascript, the ability to alter login forms, and the ability to hijack the CMS' admin sessions are non-issues.
I have a new bank now.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
Factor 1: pin number. This is something you know. Usually 4 digits, but may be arbitrary. Probability of guessing: 1/ 10^k where k is the number of digits. If digit count is variable, this makes it even more fun since 0004 and 4 are then different values.
Factor 2: CryptoCard token or similar. You push a button and it gives you the next number in a pseudorandom sequence that was pre-seeded. The computer on the other end knows the next few numbers in the sequence (the exact number probably varies depending on configuration) and if the number you enter isn't one of those, it rejects the login attempt. No number can be used twice. Probability of a successful guess: about 1 / 50,000 - 1/200,000, depending on the bank's level of paranoia about skipping numbers without a resync. :-)
Total probability: 1 / 500,000,000 - 1/2,000,000,000 depending on paranoia level for number skipping and assuming a 4 digit PIN....
Even better, I think the resync process is also basically protected against identity theft unless you have the pin number, since you can't substitute a different token and get two numbers in a sequence that would be valid for the original token, IIRC, and the resync doesn't buy you anything other than a few more tries to guess the PIN number.
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