Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 2 May 2002
Note: the comments below are the unabridged
submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: warwick For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: ANZ Online An interesting twist to the online banking scenario. I use ANZ Internet Banking, with the accepted condition that any transfer of money is strictly my responsibility. However, even I make mistakes, and one annoying thing is the inabiltiy to bring up reference numbers after a transaction has been processed (using Pay Anyone).I pay companies that require such a number to appear on there statements, so they can forward it on to the correct account. In the past, I have entered a wrong number, but no one can bring up this information. Also, a number of times the system has failed all together, and ALL reference numbers were deleted. All the payees got was a reciept number from the bank. Even though that was not my fault, the bank still could not correct it there end. The moral seems to be bank online at completly your own risk...if you make a mistake, it's your problem. If they make a mistake, it is also your problem! Either way, it seems at least for ANZ, the information you supply online, is not always available even to the internet help staff. From: name For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Bank Security Yes, and while you are on that topic i would like to point out about a complaint i made to nbnz about their online banking website caching the pages. At the moment, when you logout, if you hit the back button, surprise surprise, there's your bank balances sitting right in front of you. They told me to turn off caching in my web browser until their coders had time to stick a couple of lines of code in to prevent caching. I tested another online banking solution to see if they had the same problem, nope, hit the back button and, sorry, please login again. Now thats how it should be, i wont mention the bank but lets just say i would "Trust" them more than nbnz at the moment. From: Lindsay Williams For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Bank Security Good article, Bruce. As reported, the BNZ perpetuates the blatant falsehood that you are more at risk from emails from strangers than from acquaintances. As everyone writing this stuff should damn well know, most worms come to you because you were in someone's address book i.e someone you know. All the virused/wormed attachments I get are from slack relatives! From: Peter Harrison For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: Or Run Linux Insert obligatory mention of using Linux to solve the problem of security. Okay, call me a Linux zealot, but after getting a Virus late last year which basically wiped out my Windows 98 install I was left with a decision to reinstall Windows or make the move to Linux. I have been using Linux on my web server for years, and laughed off Code Red when it came. However I had retained Windows on my desktop because of the hassel of a total reinstall and finding Linux software for all the things I wanted to do. Then in October last year, dispite not opening attachments I somehow got a virus through outlook - and it infected a my whole machine, and also spread to my Web Server that was running Samba. Very nasty. I purged the virus easily enough, but it had corrupted several DLL's and made the system unstable. The only way to be sure of a stable install was to reinstall everything from scratch. I made the decision to move to Linux - Red Hat 7.1. The install went without a hitch, and to my surprise it included virtually all the software I needed in the standard install. Web Browser, Office, Email, pretty much everything I wanted. Installing the additional tools I wanted never involved more than using a RPM or uncompressing an archive, which is no more complex than using WinZip. No need to go near a command line. Since then I have been very happy with Linux as a desktop OS. I will admit that while the OS is stable, there are the occational application crashes. I don't think Linux is as 'polished' as Windows either in the GUI - but recent release of KDE3 may be correcting this. Now when I get a virus arrive I can rest assured that there is no way it could run - even if it were a Linux virus, unless I specifically run it myself. From: Anton For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: National Bank Well in my my experience, it's not quite that bad with the National Bank's service (I haven't used any others). By default, I can transfer money between my savings and cheque accounts but that's it. I have to contact the bank even to allow me to set up the ability to transfer to my credit card. Similarly if I want to set up a payment else where I have to arrange that link with the bank outside the system. However, I have no idea how easy it is to impersonate me to do that. Anybody breaking into my accounts won't be able to do anything except look at my transactions and transfer money between my cheque and savings accounts. From: Warwick Downs For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: alternate operating systems The BNZ are so concerned about security that you can ONLY run their internet banking option on some flavour of Windows. Mac (apparently because of a legitimate Java security issue on that platform) and Linux users are out in the cold, lining up at a counter... From: Kevin For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: National Bank Online banking The person reporting above is correct about the National Bank needing phone verification for setting up new payments. However after you have set one up, it remains available for future use. So, if for instance someone broke into my National Bank account, they would be able to transfer money between my current and savings accounts, as well as pay Trademe.co.nz (my only registered bill payee) as much money as they like. That is quite a scary thought really.Hit Reload For Latest Comments
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