58
GOOD MONTH | BAD MONTH
Bad month for...
escalating threat to its systems. Banks using its network – including central banks and commercial banks – have been hit by a number of attacks and a fifth of them have had funds stolen.
The theft from the Bangladesh central bank prompted a tightening of security regulations across the globe, and is still subject to an investigation by the FBI, Bangladesh authorities and Interpol. Now it seems that a second occurrence of large-scale theft might be a case of if, not when. “We unfortunately continue to see cases in which some of our customers’ environments are being compromised,” the
letter states. One new method of attack used by hackers involved infecting technical support software.
SWIFT has discovered these breaches either through client anti-virus software catching the malware or via its own proprietary service, which alerts it directly of attempted system manipulation. In at least one case a financial regulator alerted SWIFT to an attempted attack. “In 80% of the cases that we are aware of and where we have completed investigations, a fraud has not actually ended up taking place,” says Stephen Gilderdale, Head of SWIFT’s Customer Security Programme. “I personally am very pleased with the progress that we are making.”
Whether the network is being attacked more regularly or not remains unknown, as SWIFT didn’t track client reports about security incidents until the aftermath of the Bangladesh heist.
N26, the German digital-only challenger bank formerly known as Number26, is struggling with significant
security issues, according to Vincent Haupert, a research fellow in computer science from the University of Erlangen- Nuernberg. He told the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg that N26’s security is full of vulnerabilities that could potentially be used to defraud thousands of customers.
“They say you can open a bank account in just eight minutes,” Haupert said. “As it turns out, you can lose it even faster.” He claimed that he and his colleagues had exposed numerous ways in which they were able to attack N26 mobile apps in order to takeover individual customer accounts. “With such a strategy, FinTechs squander the trust that banks established over years.”
The new entrant responded: “We’ve recently been working in close cooperation with IT security expert Vincent Haupert, who alerted us to a theoretical security vulnerability. After consulting with him in our offices, we have since fixed the issue and taken the opportunity to make our systems even more secure. Vincent concludes his analysis with this summary: To the best of our knowledge, all vulnerabilities that we have reported to N26 are closed. We want to emphasise and commend the responsive and friendly contact with N26.”
It added: “As of today we know of no customers who were affected by the potential issue, and other than to keep your operating system and apps up to date, there is no action that any customer needs to take as a result of the fix.”
The venture, which is backed by the likes of Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel, now has a presence in 17 countries in the Eurozone as it works towards its goal of serving all Europeans within the next few years. It last year received a full banking licence from the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) and the European Central Bank.
www.ibsintelligence.com © IBS Intelligence 2017
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68
