Over 20% Mideast banks fall prey to phishing: Survey |
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Over 20 per cent of banks in the Middle East region were victims of phishing and pharming during the last one year, according to a global online transactional security survey.
The survey revealed that awareness levels of the impact of online security incidents was still quite low amongst Middle East banks with 75 per cent of the respondents unaware of online security incidents in their own organisations. Over 70 per cent of banks still did not have dedicated budget for online security. Online security was still part of the IT budget.
The survey primarily focused on Middle East's major banks across United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Kuwait and covered issues pertaining to transactional security and risk mitigation, online identity theft, MITM attacks and online financial frauds.
Singapore-based ReadiMinds, a specialist new generation transactional security and fraud prevention software product company and provider of leading edge software solutions for the financial and securities industry conducted the survey last month.
Operational risk, also called transactional risk, still do not attract enough importance in the financial institutions compared to credit and market risks. This however is changing with new regulatory guidelines, result of alarming increases in identity theft, and online financial frauds including external and internal frauds. Results clearly show that online security and surveillance is a business issue!
"Financial crime surveillance slowly but surely is gaining ground. Identity management and fraud prevention, and risk management, are the top two security agendas for 2008 for the Middle East banks," the survey disclosed.
Stronger user authentication - software based two-factor authentication methods, namely phone factor or device fingerprinting - was gaining ground over the traditional one-time pin generating hardware security devices, because of lower cost and user convenience. "Over 30 per cent of respondents now preferred it for their new implementations - a growing trend among the financial institutions."
All respondents were aware that integrating stronger user authentication with fraud detection and risk-based transaction authorisation was the strongest form of defence against online identity theft, MITM attacks and financial frauds.
Over 30 per cent respondents now redprefer integrated solution for their new implementations - fraud detection and risk based transaction authorisation together with stronger user authentication, for transactional security and fraud prevention.
"Clearly, there is increasing desire to take holistic approach to transactional security and fraud prevention."
By K.V.S. Madhav Senior Business Reporter
© Bahrain Tribune 2008
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