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Is Online Banking Risky? You Bet! 2 May 2002 Edition
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Million $ Ideas
At last, the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook are revealed for all to see!
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Here's the scenario...

You log on to the Internet in order to access your bank's online banking service so you can pay a credit card bill and move some funds around between accounts.

Hang on -- what's this? Why are all your accounts showing a zero balance?

A quick check of recent transactions shows that a week or so ago, all your money was transferred to someone else's account -- seemingly through the very online system you're currently using.

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You ring the bank to find out what's going on and are told that someone using your ID and login performed the transfer some five days ago and that this isn't the bank's fault or problem.

Uh oh... what are you going to do now?

You run a virus scan on your computer and it finds a trojan program that has, for the past month, been quietly betraying your secrets to an unknown party somewhere out there in the ether.

Unknown to you, the trojan arrived as an email that had an attachment which you opened out of curiosity. After all, you're not someone who regularly reads Aardvark or any other Internet-related publication and you believed Microsoft when it said that Windows XP was the most secure version ever produced so how were you to know this was a stupid thing to do?

Readers Say
(updated hourly)
  • ANZ Online... - warwick
  • Bank Security... - annon
  • Bank Security... - Lindsay
  • Or Run Linux... - Peter
  • National Bank... - Anton
  • alternate operating systems... - Warwick
  • National Bank Online banking... - Kevin
  • Have Your Say

    Right now you're penniless and you're hoping like hell that the bank will accept that this wasn't your fault -- what are your chances?

    A quick survey of the "Terms and Conditions" associated with NZ's online banking services seems to indicate that you might be out of luck.

    You can read them for yourself to see what I mean:

    It would appear that if you take every reasonable precaution to prevent unauthorised access to your PC (and hence unauthorised use of your ID/password) then you might (let me emphasize "might") be indemnified -- however, only the BNZ clearly lays out in any real detail what it considers to be acceptable and unacceptable.

    You have to wonder whether anyone will be able to use the BNZ's service without infringing at least one condition however. According to Section 6.2, clause f:

    "You agree not to open e-mails or attachments or run software from untrusted or unknown sources".

    Yes, that's right -- if you use BNZ's online banking service you are strictly forbidden from opening emails from people you don't know. Let's make that quite clear -- it's not that you can't open attachments on such emails -- you can't even open the mail itself.

    If you're a trader using a website to solicit new business then you'll just have to ignore those emails from prospective new customers -- how dumb is that?

    Obviously the BNZ is trying to cover its backside to avoid liability in the scenario I've already described -- but it is plainly outrageous to ask a customer to ignore emails just because the sender is not previously known to them.

    The helpdesk worker I spoke to at the BNZ regarding this draconian clause said that it probably only meant you couldn't open attachments -- but if that's the case, why doesn't it say that? I think you and I both know that when it comes to protecting the interests of shareholders, banks and insurance companies tend to enforce the letter of their contracts quite stringently.

    However, you've got to have some sympathy for the banks. Why should they have to pay up if your money goes missing through no negligence or fault on their part?

    Well perhaps there is fault on the bank's part.

    Perhaps they're negligent for using such an easily circumvented method of authentication as an ID and password. Goodness knows, there are many alternatives available (even the one I've been trying to tout with little success) which are far less vulnerable.

    Let's face it -- even the act of choosing a password is a compromise. All the banks demand that it not be something too short or easily guessed (such as a birth-date, name of a family-member, etc). On the other hand they forbid you from writing down or storing electronically that hard-to-remember password -- what's a person to do?

    Likewise -- the banks (particularly BNZ it would seem) are patently aware that Microsoft Windows is an intrinsically insecure platform so, by acknowledging the risk, they must also share in the liability.

    Whatever the case -- if you're using an online banking service you'd better make absolutely sure that you have effective anti-virus software with regularly updated data files and that your operating system, mail program and browser are updated to the latest versions at all times.

    Anything less and you're effectively leaving your life savings on a virtual park-bench somewhere in cyberspace.

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