Locking the Digital Vault: Cyber security to protect banking customers.

• Date: 01 August 2022
• Author: Barbour, Tracy

When it comes to date security, people can be the weakest link. They can also be the strongest and best defense against cyberattacks--if they know how to respond to potential threats.

A thriving fraud industry has developed around the misuse of consumers' personal information, often mined from social media, harvested through email schemes, or stolen using malicious software. The ill-gotten data is often sold on the dark web marketplace, where a Social Security number can go for $2--or more if it comes with a name and date of birth--and a person's credit card information can fetch up to $35. Hackers and organized crime syndicates purchase the information for their own nefarious purposes or resell it to end users who commit various cybercrimes.

In Alaska, most security breaches involve extortion, government impersonation, phishing, personal data breach, and identity theft. Proactive education is imperative, according to Erika Smith, Wells Fargo Alaska's regional banking district senior manager. "We spend time educating our employees so that they are empowered to have robust conversations with our customers," says Smith, who oversees ten branches from Soldotna. "Our customers are digital platforms, give them peace Of mind."

A Multi-Layered Approach

Today most banks and credit unions incorporate multiple layers of security, says Keith Bennett, senior vice president of information technology at Nuvision Credit Union, which has ten branches in Alaska and nearly thirty branches in its five-state network. Hackers know this, so they tend to focus most of their attention on obtaining individual user credentials through phishing scams that attempt to trick people into divulging their personal information.

A significant threat that Nuvision frequently encounters is credential stuffing. "Credential stuffing is a cybersecurity attack where a hacker has purchased a list of stolen user credentials from other data breaches and then uses bots to automatically target online banking platforms to see if any of the stolen credentials match a user's credentials at the financial institution," Bennett explains. "This is why it is so important to use different user credentials for your online banking than from any other online account."

However, Bennett adds, "If a member has their personal login credentials compromised and someone does manage to gain access to a member's account, we do have measures in place that flag suspicious login access and suspicious transaction activity. Suspicious transaction activity is reviewed before any money is authorized to leave the credit union."

Nuvision's strategy includes leveraging artificial intelligence...