As banking applications evolve, common attacks on banks are becoming correspondingly more sophisticated. Small businesses, municipalities, and moneyed individuals are often targeted for obvious reasons: they have hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a few million, in the bank, but their security is often no more effective than that of an average American household.

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council’s (FFIEC) updated security guidelines go into effect in less than a month. It is imperative that financial institutions recognize that the security precautions currently in place are ineffective in the face of new, more sophisticated attacks. Criminals have gotten around the minor hurdles posed by the tools being used to authenticate clients and prevent unauthorized transactions.

Basic multifactor authentication may be relatively effective for bank accounts that generally contain only enough to pay a month’s worth of bills. But high value accounts are more prone to attacks, and require additional levels of security. Ultimately, what is most important is that a security program includes multiple layers of protection rather than relying on a single mechanism of defense.

Using advanced device identification is also essential. The FFIEC suggests complex device identification, which is more advanced than previous techniques, and the leader in this space is iovation Inc. They take complex device identification much further by delivering to financial institutions, a reputation of the device as it accesses their site to apply for credit, create an account, transfer money and more.
This proven strategy not only utilizes advanced methods to identify the devices being used to connect to a bank, it also incorporates geolocation, velocity, anomalies, proxy busting, webs of associations, fraud histories, commercially applied evidence of fraud or abuse, and much more to protect financial institutions from cybercrime.

Robert Siciliano, personal security and identity theft expert contributor to iovation, discusses credit and debit card fraud on CNBC. Disclosures