Originally published August 15 2005
Banks are contributing to phishing problems, report shows
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
A new report has shown that banks are making it easier for criminals to steal your personal data and your money because they are not taking a simple and effective method to protect their consumers.
Though U.S. banks are aware that both bank card fraud and phishing--the criminal practice of tricking people into entering confidential information into fake Web sites--are problems, the link between these two phenomena is not always well understood, said Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and research director.
And with bank card fraud on the rise, this can make things harder on the victims of identity theft, she said.
Part of the problem is that about half of U.S. banks no longer use a security feature that would make phishing attacks much less effective, Litan said.
At a minimum, banks in the U.S. require an account number and personal information number in order for funds to be withdrawn from an account.
But banks are also capable of storing on a card's magnetic strip a third number, unknown to the consumer, that can be used to further authenticate its validity.
Though this third number, called a PIN offset, was widely used when cash machine cards were first introduced, only about one half of U.S. banks still use this type of security today, because it generally requires that a card be brought into the bank every time its PIN number is changed.
Based on a survey of 5000 U.S. adults conducted in May, Gartner estimates that about 3 million U.S. consumers were the victims of bank card fraud over the past year.
"I would say it's probably the cause of 70 percent of (cash machine card) fraud," Litan said.
E-mail security vendor Postini said that e-mail containing links to phishing Web sites reached an all-time high in July.
Still, phishing spam accounts for a relatively small percentage of the 8 billion e-mail messages that Postini quarantines and examines every month, he said.
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