Phishing has become an epidemic within the banking industry, and the jury is still out as to who is responsible for the results of the newest digital crime-wave. Joe Lopez of Miami, Florida, is claiming in his lawsuit against Bank of America, that the bank negligently allowed a Latvian phisher to illegally withdraw $90,000 from his bank account.
Bank of America, for its part, takes no responsibility for the apparent ease with which the fraudulent transaction took place. The bank clearly knew about the threat of phishing attacks on its customers, that the fraudulent transfer was for an inordinately large sum of money, to a country with which Lopez did not ordinarily do business, and to a country which is known for its cybercrime connections.
A Bank of America’s attorney has said that the bank was not responsible for the loss “because no one hacked into its system to initiate the wire transfer". Of course, if a bank is robbed, the bank may not ordinarily be responsible either, but what if they did not take adequate precautions to protect their customer’s cash? What if they had put a sign in the window saying “We leave our customer’s cash out loose on the counter?” when they knew that a band of bank robbers was active in the neighborhood? What then?
Bank of America is not alone! Fraudulent requests to validate confidential information for financial services organizations appear in email boxes on a daily basis, and, unfortunately unsuspecting victims reply too often. Nomad understands that the protection of business information is a necessity and not a luxury. Dissatisfied customers who are concerned about the safety of their financial assets, and increased security pressures attributed to the new wave of Identity phishing, are forcing banks to rethink their position as to who is responsible. Financial organizations must be able to ensure that every user that accesses their network is truly who they say they are with strong authentication. Unfortunately this was not the case for Joe Lopez of Miami, Florida, who was scammed and has filed a lawsuit against Bank of America.
Fortunately there is a new solution available from Nomad Security that protects banking clients and eliminates the disastrous results of phishing. Simply put, even though Joe Lopez was a victim of identity phishing, without possession of the physical Nomad Secure Access credentials, access to his bank account would have been denied.
Nomad Secure Access (Nomad SA) is a security software solution that combines the power of two-factor authentication based on X509 V3 credentials and an on-demand private network (OPN) to protect information transmitted between a bank’s client and the bank. Unlike pre-configured VPN’s and static credentials, with Nomad SA a client’s credentials and OPN client can be stored on their home computer. Or if client’s need the flexibility to access their bank account from other computers, the credentials and OPN client can be stored on a smart card, USB thumb drive or any other form of removable media and roam with the mobile clients. Nomad SA creates end-to-end secure access from any computer - identifying who the user is, authenticating the user to the network and specific banking applications while creating a trusted connection over HTTP, SMTP, FTP, or Telnet.
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