Does online banking put your money at risk?
I recently received another email “alert” from “my bank” - “CitiBank”, telling me due to recent identity theft and fraudulent emails, CitiBank needs me to update my personal information by clicking the provided link. The sender of the email was shown as “customerservice@citibank.com”. The CitiBank logo was displayed in the email. The request was to “protect” me, a customer of CitiBank. Everything seemed so right. I almost wanted to click the link, but I did not.
Of course, I would never click such a link. As a researcher working on security and privacy, I’m quite familiar with such kind of fraudulent emails. But for the general public, especially those inexperienced Internet users, would they click such a link and update their personal information?
Study has shown that this attack (using fraudulent emails and screens to trick customers to provide their personal information) has a surprisingly high success ratio. As many as 5% of the email recipients were tricked by these fraudulent emails and screens. (I wish I had a reference for you about the 5%. I heard that in a seminar at NC State University in May 2004 given by Professor Marianne Winslett from UIUC.)
So, are you scared or are you astonished by the high success ratio of the attack?
I have been using online banking for over three years. So far it works pretty good for me. I enjoy the convenience that online banking has brought to me. So, maybe it is not bad after all.
A recent article by Tony Lima - Does Online Banking Put Your Money at Risk?, states that scammers and thieves are out there, but you can protect yourself. I agree with Tony. But I also think the security knowledge of the general public is far from good enough to protect themselves against the attacks that are invented every day.
Even for myself, I do not completely trust the security of online banking. For example, there is usually less than $1,500 balance in my checking account. This is the average amount I use to pay my bills each month for an apartment living. I have other accounts that I never use online banking. In this way, I have limited the maximal loss of my account in the worst case.
Online banking brings us a lot of convenience and also poses additional risks. Knowledge is the power. With more security knowledge, people can protect themselves from being attacked or tricked. There is a great need for more security training on and off campus for everyone that are involved in online banking and e-commerce.