[Clips] Banks Seek Better Online-Security Tools

[Bill Stewart]

At 08:05 PM 12/2/2005, dan at geer.org wrote:
>You know, I'd wonder how many people on this
>list use or have used online banking.

I've used it for about a decade at my credit union,
and I've had my paychecks deposited directly for decades.
There are things I absolutely won't do,
like have a debit card attached to the account,
or have companies authorized to take money out directly,
or have electronic checks of various sorts taken out of the account.
Normally I don't do email with them (though nobody appears to have
noticed them as a phishing target), but I did have one time
I had to ask about a transaction, and they do that by email,
so I was able to trust the responses.

But for basic services where I tell them what to send to whom,
it's reliable, appears to be at least as secure as
the other risks to the account, and it means that the
basic payments I need to make every month happen automatically,
so I only have to pay attention to the occasional variable transaction.

I've also used account-based electronic gold services,
but only transactionally, so at most they end up with a couple dollars
worth of exchange-rate breakage in them, and there are some
non-account-based services that I've also used.
I won't use e-gold - not that their website is obviously insecure,
but for a while there was so much e-gold phishing that
I set my filters to automatically discard anything purporting
to be from them, which might interfere with doing real business.
On the other hand, they don't appear to state a policy of
always digitally signing all transactions, so I'm a bit concerned
beyond the more blatant phishing risks.

                 Thanks; Bill Stewart




---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com