Author: Chris Jones @TurnOnVPN
The banking sector is experiencing unprecedented transformations as digital banking and other fintech innovations are introduced. This has brought about numerous benefits but also novel cyber security risks.
Cybersecurity Threats
From open banking to digital banking and other fintech-inspired models, the numerous cybersecurity trends that are threatening the future of online banking cannot be left unchecked.
Some of these are new, coming to the fore as technology is expanding to new realms. The other category has been there for a while, telling us that tackling these problems to make them go away forever won’t happen overnight.
Of these, the recurrent and stubborn trends that will impact the future of the digital banking model are:
Identity Theft
Logically, it would be almost impossible to impersonate an account owner if the culprit had to walk into a physical branch. With the advent of digital models such as credit cards, online banking and more, this has become very easy.
Yearly, the banking sector is estimated to lose about $10 million to these cases alone, seeing as there is a new victim every 2 seconds.
Human errors
Even if there was a fail-safe system in place, human error will undo all the good work. This will happen in the case of employees checking secure work accounts over insecure networks, unknowingly downloading malicious files onto the server network, and much more.
Granted, sensitization to these issues is on the rise too. But then, do they seem to be going away anytime soon?
Synthetic fraud
Perhaps the biggest slap on the face of the digital banking sector is synthetic fraud. This is almost a case of using digital to beat digital, and it has been working in favor of the hackers involved.
What they have to do under this model of attack is to generate a new identity from scratch. This new identity somehow comes to be in the possession of a social security number, ID number and more. These non-existent personas are then used to seek loans and other forms of credit from the banking sector.
You would not think that they would be a huge issue if they didn’t account for over $300 million borrowed debt. The worst case is that this debt does not even exist since the loans were taken by ghosts.
The Way Forward
If there is one sure thing, it is that there is no going back at this stage.
We have tasted the digital model, and we can all agree that it is good. It comes up with the bad sides from time to time, but we need just learn to live with it.
How so?
Fintech companies and other players in the digital space should keep leveraging advancement in tech to beat the criminals at this game. Big data is there for AI to sift through, so the machine can learn the various models of attack and prevent them at the point of injection.
Human error should also be largely checked. It should also be put into account as one uncontrollable variable. Maybe then, measures can be implemented to see that a human error won’t bring down the network or grant unauthorized access.
Users, on their part, also need to know how to keep great online banking practices. These things don’t take any time: from ensuring strong passwords are used to locking your account down when you suspect suspicious activity. On the upside, they save a lot of time, energy and hassles.