How Can I Manage The Risks Associated With Online Banking?

Author: Lee Ives

Author: Lee Ives

Identity theft is on the increase and thats a fact. More and more people are losing their money and, worse, their identities each year due to the efforts of a select few cyber criminals who now how to use the internet for their own personal gain. Online Banking Risks Does that mean you should avoid using online banking services? No, of course not. If you know what to look out for, and can utilise some commonsense, then the risks will be insignificant. Contrary to what you may believe, big financial institutions do take the issues of identity theft and fraud very seriously indeed. Its not good business if their customers become crime victims - they wouldn't be in business for very long if they didn't. However, cyber criminals are always developing too. Gone are the days of lone rangers, online fraud is now an organised criminal activity and new methods of stealing identities are being developed every day. Online Banking Threats The number one threat to your identity is phishing. Phishing, in its purest form, employs fake email and even some websites in order to collect personal information from you. As you can imagine, this information includes such staples as your bank account numbers, social security number and credit card numbers. Cyber criminals will also be after the Holy Grail too your passwords. Not only your banking passwords but those you use for social networking sites too. (as for why, Ill come back to that in a future article) Should criminals get hold of some or all of this information from you then you really are going to be in trouble. They will steal your money, run up credit card debt, take out loans and basically destroy your finances for years to come. For that reason it is incredibly important to ensure that whenever you enter information on a website that you have checked that it is legitimate and secure. As for emails, dont reply to them if they ask for personal information. No, really, just dont! Another thing to look out for is a keystroke logger. Keystroke loggers can collect important information, such as those passwords I mentioned, and usernames which can then be used by a criminal to hack into your online banking account. To protect yourself from this threat, it is important to check your computer on a regular basis to make sure you do not have any malicious programs installed. Keystroke loggers can be installed on your system without you even knowing it and many people are often surprised to find out how much malware they have on their system. You can avoid malware and many other threats by installing and running a good internet security suite of programs. Finally, try not to record any of your banking information anywhere youre own memory is far more secure than any computer file or post-it note. Certainly dont keep such information anywhere near your computer! If you should forget your own password or username it's a lot easier to change it than to worry about losing your money to a computer hacker.About the Author:

Lee Ives writes more about a wide range of computer security issues on his blog. You should head over there now and check it out @ Security FAQs

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