Some UK financial institutions are letting their prospects down with inadequate authentication and web security issues, in accordance to a client rights group.
Which? as soon as again teamed up with impartial security consultants 6issue6 to appraise the “front-end” security of 15 present-day account providers. It looked at 4 criteria: encryption and security, login, account management and navigation.
The report identified that, while all loan companies followed sturdy consumer authentication (SCA) regulations as laid down in European banking polices, some exposed their consumers to SIM swapping attacks.

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That is mainly because they employed two-factor checks working with SMS, which hackers can intercept if they have tricked the victim’s network operator into transferring their cell phone variety to a SIM less than the attacker’s regulate.
Lloyds, Metro, Nationwide, TSB, Santander and The Co-operative Financial institution all dropped factors in the tests for this, although the latter two claimed they’re “looking to move away from SMS,” in accordance to Which?.
The report also highlighted issues with insecure passwords.
“We had been shocked to discover that Triodos allows clients established insecure security text, together with ‘password’, ‘1234567’ and ‘admin.’ The risk is mitigated by a two-factor authentication at login (using its actual physical ‘Digipass’ unit) but there is no excuse for a bank to allow these types of weak qualifications,” it argued.
“Six financial institutions (HSBC, NatWest, Santander, Starling, The Co-operative Lender, and Virgin Funds) permit you select passwords that incorporate your to start with identify and/or surname. Santander advised us this is becoming phased out, and NatWest and Virgin Money reported they may increase password limitations immediately after our investigation.”
Virgin Cash was also singled out for allowing for the scientists to established up a new payee without having additional security measures.
The report also uncovered three banking institutions with susceptible subdomains that could perhaps be compromised, and one banking app which does not need people to log in every time.
Overall, HSBC came major in the on the internet banking security assessments with a rating of 81%, and Initial Immediate was in initial location for mobile banking security, with a score of 77%.
Some sections of this article are sourced from:
www.infosecurity-journal.com