Internet security guru Brian Krebs had an excellent post a few weeks ago about much of the attention on cyberheists may be focused on the security vulnerabilities of small banks and their business customers, the large banks are playing a large role in small banks' losses.
A $170,000 cyberheist last month against an Illinois nursing home provider starkly illustrates how large financial institutions are being leveraged to target security weaknesses at small to regional banks and credit unions.
I have written about more than 80 organizations that were victims of cyberheists, and a few recurring themes have emerged from nearly all of these breaches. First, a majority of the victim organizations banked at smaller institutions. Second, virtually all of the money mules — willing or unwitting individuals recruited to help launder the stolen funds — used accounts at the top five largest U.S. banks.
Krebs responds to a question often asked of him, whether it's safer for a business to bank with a large bank rather than a small bank, by asserting that it's a difficult question to answer "because banking online remains a legally and financially risky affair for any business, regardless of which bank it uses"
Businesses do not enjoy the same fraud protections as consumers; if a Trojan lets the bad guys siphon an organization’s online accounts, that victim organization is legally responsible for the loss. The financial institution may decide to reimburse the victim for some or all of the costs of the fraud, but that is entirely up to the bank.
That's right. Regulation E does not apply to business customers. That's something that sometimes comes as a shock to small business customers, especially those who were too cheap to hire legal counsel to review the account and other online banking agreements before they were signed. "Forewarned is forearmed" is an old adage with a lot of wisdom behind it. It's not that banks will negotiate the terms of their agreements (most of them will not, especially with small customers), but that customers who understand their legal position going into the relationship are more likely to be concerned about doing due diligence on the bank's security procedures and track record and considering other methods to lessen and cover their risks (I've seen a few who suddenly realize that having a PC dedicated solely to online banking transactions and no other activities is not such a waste of money, after all).
Krebs also points out that since larger banks are more likely to have the resources to settle even large losses to avoid the reputational risk of cyberheists, it may be difficult to know how many instances of loss occur. However, it's reasonable to assume that the large banks spend a lot more money and person-power on security measures than do small banks.
Wearing my cyberthief glasses, if I’m looking at a huge pile of data stolen from thousands of victims, I’m probably more apt to target victims at smaller banks based on one simple assumption: Because I’m going to have a much higher success rate than I would targeting customers of larger institutions.
Krebs takes a shot at technology service providers who service many of the smaller banks for not doing more to secure online banking transactions.
Case in point: Optimumbank’s service provider is Fiserv, one of the largest banking industry service providers. According to Fiserv’s site, at least 52 percent of the nation’s $19 billion in ACH payments are processed using Fiserv software. If this is true, one might think that Fiserv’s systems handled about half of the mule transfers that were sent from Niles Nursing’s hacked bank account.
But according to Murray Walton, Fiserv’s chief risk officer, the software that most of its customer banks run — called PEP+ – is a client solution that does not interact with the company’s data centers. He said while Fiserv does offer an antifraud solution called FraudNet, that tool is designed for online bill pay services that banks can use to detect fraud patterns on consumer accounts.
“There are vendors who can knit it all together for banks, but that isn’t what we do,” Walton said in an interview. “For various and sundry reasons we don’t offer an engine that does the same thing as [an anti-fraud provider like] Guardian Analytics. Realistically, the client and end-user have responsibilities that they can’t abdicate to us. Everyone in this needs to take it seriously and not think that someone else has their back.”
I understand Walton's point, but on the other hand, a small bank's takeaway from those three paragraphs might be "Fiserv doesn't have your back, so look elsewhere." A competing core platform and processing vendor that "does have your back" might have a tag line to use.
Large banks are also lambasted for allowing so many "mule accounts" to be established.
As it stands, the big banks don’t have an incentive to police new accounts for mule activity, because it’s generally not their customers who are getting robbed from this activity, said Avivah Litan, a fraud analyst with Gartner Inc.
“The bad guys shouldn’t be able to set up these mule accounts in the first place,” Litan said. “The bigger banks are not doing a good job of screening for this activity because they’re not the ones eating the fraud on these attacks on smaller bank customers. [The bank service providers] should be spending more money. And the regulators should be coming down on them harder.”
Krebs suggests that, perhaps, "small, regional and local banks can pool their clout and resources to extract more from service providers than what those companies are currently offering." Fat chance. Several years ago, some of the largest users of technology services in the country made a concerted effort to get giant service providers to take more contractual responsibility for the performance, and vulnerabilities, of their technology. It fell flat. Unless the bank regulatory agencies intervene directly with the service providers, they'll continue to do what they do best: collect fees and deny liability.
As for watching your own back as it applies to business customers, Krebs offers some good suggestions, among them:
- Shop around for banks until you find one that assures you that it uses layered security.
- Use "Positive Pay" if your bank offers it because it not only deters check fraud but other unauthorized transfers, online and off (I heartily concur).
- Use Live CD to temporarily covert your PC from Microsoft to Linux for doing online banking transactions.
Krebs also offers an online "best practices" guide for businesses. As with much of his material, it's good stuff.
