Out-Law News 3 min. read
13 Apr 2005, 7:30 pm
"I predict that banks and other financial institutions will spend millions outfitting their users with two-factor authentication tokens. Early adopters of this technology may very well experience a significant drop in fraud for a while as attackers move to easier targets, but in the end there will be a negligible drop in the amount of fraud and identity theft.""We already see smart Trojans and man-in-the-middle attacks bypassing authentication technologies that, until recently, were perceived as silver bullets", adds Uri Rivner, VP International Marketing for Cyota, a company that specialises in solutions to online fraud at financial institutions. "Even if you come up with something that looks like a silver bullet, you might find that it's pretty difficult to hit a moving target".And on-line fraud is indeed a rapidly moving target. Today's on-line criminals have greater capabilities, technologies, resources and motivation to conduct on-line fraud, resulting in wave after wave of new, innovative on-line attacks. They tend to be faster than the large financial organisations, not bound to policies and procedures."If the threats are highly adaptive, you need to think about building an adaptive defence mechanism", says Mr Rivner. "This means building multiple lines of defence: starting with solutions that neutralise specific fraud sources such a phishing or pharming; through stronger authentication solutions that can adapt to new threats; and finally, an on-line fraud detection solution that can monitor and manage the fraud that slips through the previous lines of defence".