09.22.09
Windows Compromises Bank Accounts While M-Com and Microsoft Launch Mobile Banking Service
“Bill Gates says banks are dinosaurs, well, some dinosaurs run real fast and bite the hell out of you.”
–Unknown
Summary: Just as Microsoft tries to enter the banking business, new reports suggest that Windows is a bank’s worst nightmare
THE BANKING industry is still closely tied to Microsoft, but at sight of new reports like this one, is it not time for them to require that customers access their bank accounts only from Live (Linux) CDs such as Knoppix?
Cyber criminals have created a highly sophisticated Trojan virus that steals online banking log-in details from infected computers.
The Clampi virus, which is spreading rapidly across hundreds of thousands of computers in Britain and the United States, infects computers when users visit websites that host a malicious code.
[...]
The trojan has a list of more than 4,500 finance-related websites that it monitors, including British high street banks. Security experts warned that it was one of the stealthiest and most pervasive threats to computers using the Microsoft Windows operating systems.
The article at least bothers to mention that it is a Windows problem, unlike other new threats which require a download, interception of traffic, or terrible human error (not even social engineering). These issues are not viral, so they are easier to keep under control.
The above report is timely because in other news from last week, Microsoft wishes to bring its highly insecure software to banking. Another new report suggests that Vista 7 will be more of the same regarding security. But we already knew that because there is overwhelming evidence [1, 2, 3, 4]. █
David Gerard said,
September 22, 2009 at 9:57 am
In the real world, financial companies run lots and lots of Java on Red Hat and Solaris, if they aren’t doing big enough things for mainframes.
Approximately no-one in the financial sector runs Windows in the server room unless it’s utterly unavoidable for some reason. And they’re really conservative about what even goes on their desktops. For obvious reasons.