Internet banking is a new age technology used to make transaction electronically via the internet. According to the Avaya Banking Survey, 2017 The online Banking channels for Indians is around 51%. 26% of Indian customers prefer to access services via their bank’s website, and the same number would prefer to use a mobile app rather than talk to a human agent. 37% of Indian respondents will change banks if they had a bad experience. One in four would share their bad experience on social media. So this makes internet banking a major gateway for transferring money.
When it comes to the safety of Internet Banking it is actually safer than your conventional Branch Banking. It uses minimum SSL/128 bit encryption security which basically means there are 2^128 numbers of keys and out of that only one key will be able to open the lock.
2^128= 339,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years to crack a simple key.
This calculation might satisfy your concern about using internet banking and it is quite impressive too as this is unbelievably good encryption technology. But, the only bottleneck of this internet banking is not the technology but it is us the user
The user in order to login needs a password. This password consists of few letters, numbers, and symbol in a particular sequence that makes up the key of your internet banking portal. This key can be easily stolen by anyone if the person knows the password. Now, the password can be easily stolen by anyone and there are various ways to do so namely social engineering, phishing, over the shoulder look, simple guessing etc are few ways.
How Users get easily scammed?
The only reason of people getting their account hacked is because they are not attentive to the situation around them. most of the time the user get notified about the fraud after a long time. The major reason behind such an incident is the lack of knowledge. There are a variety of ways through which a hacker can hack your bank account
Phishing– A phishing email leads the unsuspecting reader to a faked login page associated with whatever service it is the hacker wants to access, requesting the user to put the information and leads to the password getting skimmed and the hacker can use it for their own purpose.
Keyloggers– It is a tool used for logging the keys the victim is typing. The hacker masks the software behind any useful software like any game and then whenever the user types anything including the password the software makes a log of it and sends to the hacker.
How to make your Internet Banking environment safe?
- Scan your computer regularly with Antivirus to ensure that the system is Virus/Trojan free
- Change your Internet Banking password at periodical intervals and Avoid easy-to-guess passwords, like first names, birthdays and telephone numbers. Try to have an alphanumeric password that combines alphabets and numbers.
- Avoid accessing Internet banking accounts from cyber cafes or shared PCs
- Access your bank website only by typing the URL in the address bar of your browser.
- Be aware of downloading any malicious application from mobile application stores
- Do not click on any links in an e-mail message to access the site.
- Do not be lured if you receive an e-mail/SMS/phone call a promising reward for providing your personal information or for updating your account details in the bank site
- Having the following will improve your internet security:
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- A newer version of Operating System with latest security patches.
- The latest version of Browsers
- Firewall is enabled.
- Antivirus signatures applied
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