So, how safe is online banking?
Touch wood, I haven't had any money stolen from my online accounts,
but a friend of a friend has had £2000 stolen from her account. It
was taken out of an online ISA account. There was no obvious theft
of her username or password, so it must have been via a trojan horse
... malicious software that can secretly infect anyone's computer.
Most of you will have had "phishing" emails, asking you to update your
bank details online ... I have had several of these, and they look very
convincing. I got a spate of emails about someone abusing my eBay account,
who was buying more and more expensive items in my name, including an iPod.
I was nearly "taken in" by these ... a fraudster was hoping I'd reply &
verify all my account details.
Coming back to the trojan horse concept... part of the malicious software
includes a key-logging device which records & relays all the keystrokes
you use when logging into a bank / building society website.
I don't know how accurate the next piece of info is, but I've been told
that there are two vulnerable areas on your internet page ... your
Favourites column and your Google search-box. It appears that these two
areas are being targetted by the key-loggers.
So if you use either your Favourites or your Google search box for logging
into a bank account, you might be at higher risk than if you were to simply
type in your bank's URL address into the address box at the very top of
your internet page. I wonder how long it will be before the URL box is
targetted too.
There are lots of articles on this subject on Google ... here's one of
them ...
http://tinyurl.com/44w69q
