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Banks Urge Businesses To Lock Down Online Banking
tsu doh nimh writes "Organized cyber-gangs in Eastern Europe are increasingly preying on small and mid-size companies in the US, setting off a multimillion-dollar online crime wave that has begun to worry the nation's largest financial institutions, The Washington Post's Security Fix blog reports: '"In the past six months, financial institutions, security companies, the media and law enforcement agencies are all reporting a significant increase in funds transfer fraud involving the exploitation of valid banking credentials belonging to small and medium sized businesses," reads a confidential alert issued by the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group created to share data about critical threats to the financial sector.' The banking group is urging that commercial bank customers 'carry out all online banking activity from a standalone, hardened, and locked-down computer from which e-mail and Web browsing is not possible.' The story includes interviews with several victim businesses, and explains that in each case, the fraudsters — thought to reside in Eastern Europe — are using "'money mules,' unwitting or willing accomplices in the US hired via Internet job boards. The blog has more stories and details about these crimes."
It wouldn't be rocket surgery, or especially onerous in cost/seat terms, for major financial institutions to hack together and press a bunch of "Banking liveCDs".
No writable persistent storage, just a browser(configured so that it will only accept pages from the institution's set of domains and only when those pages have appropriate SSL certs. Completely reject all non-SSL pages, and any SSLed pages with certs for other institutions, or from other CAs).
There would probably be some annoying edge cases(some ghastly graphics card that isn't supported by default, and freaks out in VESA mode, say) or network issues(though you could always offer a cheap USB ethernet or wifi adapter, with a known working chipset, at cost to interested customers); but it'd be fairly easy to cover 95% of the boring business boxes and common home machines that you would be concerned about, if suitably generic settings were used.
As hardware gets cheaper and/or for larger accounts, it might even make sense to put together a dedicated banking appliance offering, basically the cheapo embedded ARM embodiment of the above.
Do you have a citation for your claim?
I would certainly believe that most of this crime comes from places like Eastern Europe and Russia, because it makes perfect sense. Those parts of the world are now connected to the West through the internet, and the people there are smarter and better educated than Americans (especially in regards to science and math). There's a good reason so many companies have software development teams in places like Russia, Latvia, and Romania these days. With all the computer expertise in those regions, it makes perfect sense that a lot of fraudulent activity would come from there as well.
That should definitely raise a red flag at a bank. Credit card companies definitely do that type of check. On the other hand, if your computer is already infected with malware, making the attacker proxy the connection through your computer (and use the same cookies and user agent, too, so it looks like the same user) seems like a minor hoop to jump through.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Could we at least start by replacing the freaking pin numbers with something meaningful? A four digit numeric does NOT make a password FFS!!
Maybe next, we could graduate the bank's computers from Windows 2000 up to something remotely sane - like Redhat SEL.
The idea of a biometric ID in conjuntion with a reasonably secure password hash has it's appeal, as well. If my bank would use it, I'd install a fingerprint reader on my HOME computer. Businesses should just jump on that idea - it's a small price to increase security dramatically.
Finally, maybe we can get around to "Linux - the year of the desktop!" Face it, boys and fanbois - no unix-like machine is open to as many exploits as Windows is.
I'm just dreaming, of course. If I manage to live another 20 years, we'll still be having similar discussions, PIN numbers will still be 4 digit numerics, and Windows XP will be the ancient, outdated operating system of choice for banks.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The browser effectively turns into a sandboxed application, which is what the banks here want.
Why not just make a separate application? You're trying to force a browser to be essentially different than what it was designed to be, and then you're complaining that it's not really working.
I know cross-platform availability is great, but you can also do that with say Qt. Not to mention you'd have your own nicely designed UI instead of the clunky pile of shit most banks today do, without inheriting the security problems of every fucking browser out there. One would think that because this is an absolutely critical task in terms of security, banks would at least try to minimize the amount of code involved, or at least the amount of code they have no fucking control over whatsoever.
I know Web 2.0 is hyped right now, but stop acting like the browser is the only application capable of establishing a network connection. As a famous cat put it: THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.
I am from Eastern Europe. Such crimes or such articles really hurt. Everybody gets convinced that people from Eastern Europe sooner or later will pull out a trick like that. And that image is really bad in global economy.
Why should a malicious software be possible on a PC at all? People pay for the operating system. And they have to pay for anti-virus, for ant-spy-ware. This is the point.
Why Windows-One-Care cannot be part of the OS? And people all over the world will sigh with a relief. Is it not done to milk billions from customers first for a monopoly insecure OS and then second time for making the OS secure.
Very conveniently fit people from Eastern Europe of criminal persuasion in this picture. Very conveniently. But this image really hurts interests of honest hard working people from Eastern Europe on a global market scene. There are a lot of good people in Eastern Europe who brought good things into this world, say, periodical system of elements, first flight into space, etc.
Include the Windows-One-Care in Windows and stop harassing us.