Phishing the financial and banking seas

Thanks to the emergence of mobile devices, social networks, and new technologies such as Near Field Communications, the attack surface area against financial institutions has expanded at an explosive rate, providing cybercriminals more opportunities than ever to go "fishing" at your CU's expense.

Image source: Hitchster / CC BY 2.0

The top threats are payment card fraud, cheque fraud, phishing/vishing, account takeover, and third-party point-of-sale skimming, with about 80% of such incidents experienced by banking customers and an exponential escalation of malware attacks targeting financial transactions. Many large financial institutions are confident in their security measures and preparedness against the modern threat landscape, but recent history suggests otherwise.

Yet the painfully long list of increased security breaches within the past year is only the tip of the iceberg. As pointed out by U.S. Vice Admiral J. Mike McConnel (Rtd), "if you can just contaminate the data in one large bank, you could cause global banking to collapse."

Is your CU one of these overconfident institutions? Take a look at this Malta Independent report for a reality check...

Global Payments Breach Fueled Prepaid Card Fraud

Debit card accounts stolen in a recent hacker break-in at card processor Global Payments have been showing up in fraud incidents.

Image source: Article

Union Savings Bank began seeing an unusual pattern of fraud on a dozen or so debit cards it had issued, noting that most of the cards had recently been used in the same cafe at a nearby private school.

USB officials say the bank has suffered approximately $75,000 in fraudulent charges, and that it has so far spent close to $10,000 reissuing customer cards.

Can crooks encode card numbers and expiration dates onto your CU's cards? Read more to see how they are doing it.

Credit Card Fraud: Have your members been a victim without even knowing?

It seems like all we hear about lately is credit card fraud, someone’s identity being stolen, unsafe hotspots for wi-fi, or hacking. How can we ever feel safe in a world where technology is increasing but it feels as though the safety of our personal information is decreasing?

Image source: Article

Global Payments recently dealt with the misfortune of having some of their cardholders’ information stolen. “The company says that only what’s known as Track 2 data (relating to the magnetic strip on the back of the card) was stolen--that is, the credit card numbers and their expiration dates,” as stated in an article in PC World.

What is the good news from all this? There are approximately 181 million credit cards in the United States. Even though 1.5 million card numbers may have been breached, that number only represents less than one percent of credit card holders.

Were one your members of the 1.5 million that was unfortunate enough to be part of this security breach? Read the full article here.