Another banker worry – criminal eavesdroppers benefitting from Moore’s Law
True story. I was in a tough negotiation. There was a knock on the door from a colleague. Annoyed, I told him that I could not take any interruptions. He said in a whisper:
“You really want to hear this. I can tell you what price they are willing to settle for”.
He had overheard them when they went for a pee. Silly of them – check behind you for locked stalls.
What if criminals were able to listen in on the conversations between bankers and clients on a mass scale?
Thanks to Moore’s Law, that is happening today. You know those movies where spies and counterspies are in a truck doing that eavesdropping?
Thanks to open source and Moore’s Law that capability now comes in a laptop bag and costs peanuts.
If you communicate using Wifi or mobile data, you are at risk. Who has the time to plug into a fixed line? Mobile is the answer to productivity.
It gets worse. Not only can criminals listen in, they can get control of your device and steal directly from you. All the security systems are looking the other way. If the system believes it is you (an approved entity), the door is wide open.
In the ever-escalating cyber security war, there is always somebody willing to sell Banks the tools to combat the bad guys. In this case, that somebody is an Israeli company called CoroNet that came out of stealth yesterday. I was briefed by Co-Founder, Dror Liwer on Monday.
CoroNet (url is Coro.net) is a classic Israeli cyber security venture of the type we wrote about when the Fintech Global Tour went to Israel.
CoroNet call what the criminals are doing “commjacking”.
Dror mentioned three use cases (aka pain points) in banking:
- Small Remote branches. These will often use WiFi or cellular data as the primary access to the network.
- Senior executives when traveling. Imagine that conversation where my colleague overheard the negotiation terms and it is a multi-billion $ M&A deal and the person overhearing is a criminal who will sell that knowledge to a competitor.
- High Net Worth clients communicating with their Private Banker. Again, travel is when the exposure is highest.
CoroNet offer an enterprise solution that is best understood as like sonar detecting a submarine. They look for the signals that indicate a commjacker nearby in the same way sonar detects the signals that indicate a submarine is nearby.
