Title:
Security in Internet Banking: How Users Can Be Protected
Abstract: Protecting personal information in the contemporary
‘online’ world is growing in importance everyday. Industries relying on the
Internet, such as financial services are facing a variety of issues regarding
information protection. While Internet banking provides significant convenience
benefits for customers, it has also resulted in a number of new risks, exposing
users to many new security threats and has increased the risk of fraud and
theft of their money. This paper provides the findings from a contemporary
literature review, an interview with a major financial institution in Australia
and an analysis of e-banking and Internet banking security issues. The literature
review provides the technical knowledge of Internet banking fraud and threats,
such as Phishing as well as the solutions to such fraud. The interview and
the e-banking security analysis sections then provide information about the
current Internet banking security practices in the market. The third section,
e-banking security from an individual customer point of view, analyses the
security requirements for connectivity, user authentication and content for
regular internet banking transactions of four multinational financial institutions.
The paper concludes with a comparison between the literature review and the
security practices of the financial institutions, highlighting that a great
majority of the financial services industry aims to constantly update and
be as close as possible to the ‘ideal world’ suggested by the literature.
However, facts show that due to the trade off between implementation costs,
user friendliness of technology and long decision making processes in the
financial services industry there will always be a lag behind new threats
and state of the art solutions.
Authors: Alexander
Kaiser, Fabiana Fernandes, and Daniel Rothfield