With banks providing more protection for its online clients, including making available insurance schemes that can cover for ATM robbery or even tampering and mechanical malfunctions of the ATM, cybercrime is training its guns big time on the banking institutions themselves.
While data from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas estimates P400 million lost in two years, from 2012 to 2013, by bank depositors because of illegal PIN (personal identification number) capturing devices, banks worldwide are getting penalized by the more sophisticated hackers.
The latest figures compiled by international watchdogs approximate the global banking industry’s losses to more than $1 billion annually, a hefty sum especially for those banks that had their defenses breached because of inadequate software protection.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that banks should no longer pay attention to preventing “petty” ATM attacks because the amount lost to this, no matter how paltry compared to that siphoned by the gang of notorious international cyber thieves, hurts the depositor in an equally big way.
Proactive protection
Having well-lighted ATM locations, constantly reminding depositors of the need to properly secure the safety of their PINs, and being vigilant of these machine hackers is still part and parcel of the banks’ proactive campaign to encourage depositors to trust automated banking.
On the other hand, the big lesson for banks in protecting themselves from big-time cyber criminals is to constantly upgrade their mainframe operating systems as well as their cash dispensing machine computers and corresponding software to make them more difficult to breach by hacker attacks.
Online banking, the way to go
More and more, online banking is becoming the choice of banks and its customers, especially companies and institutions, because of the savings gained from less transaction expenses as well as synergies generated from data integration and interactive marketing initiatives.
For those that account for the bulk of the world’s money, online banking has allowed smoother transactions in real time, which in turn translated to better profits. This has consequently encouraged mergers in the banking industry because maintaining a sound online banking system costs a lot of money, something that a struggling rural bank will remotely consider investing in.
Thus, the name of the game for banks to succeed with electronic banking is to continue investing in their operating systems to give their customers the best possible services, and ensuring that adventurous hackers are held back from prying into the bank data.
ATM insurance
While the Philippines has quite a number of big, reputable banks that strongly espouse online banking, there is a bigger number of banks – especially in the provinces – that operate on a limited reach but still can afford to operate ATMs.
To provide adequate protection to these small banks, as well as to their predominantly individual savings account depositors, it is heartening to hear that there are now new measures that can be undertaken, including one contained in a bill seeking to require all banks to offer their clients some form of insurance protection against ATM fraud.
Banks are encouraging depositors to go online as there are benefits in terms of operating costs. However, these banks must ensure that there is adequate protection to depositors availing of online banking, particularly the use of ATM.
People who entrust their money with banks should be able to sleep soundly at night knowing that it is in a safe place. This goes without saying that such protection by the banks should extend to credit cards, loans, deposits, and other banking instruments that are used to transact currencies in their many forms.
No comments:
Post a Comment