UPDATED 23:45 EDT / JULY 03 2017

INFRA

Study finds banks and other financial institutions score poorly on online security

A new study has found that some of the largest U.S. banks and financial institutions score quite poorly when it comes to online security.

The study, from the Online Trust Alliance, audited more than 1,000 websites and found that a staggering 65 of the top 100 financial institutions in the U.S. received a failing grade. Only 27 of the top 100 qualified for “Honor Roll” status, which requires scoring 80 percent or higher security testing.

According to the study, financial sites failed because of an “increased number of data breaches, observed site security vulnerabilities and inadequate privacy disclosures” over the last year, meaning that no banking site appeared in the top 50 most secure sites examined in the study.

Not everyone agrees with the results, however. American Banking Association Senior Vice President Doug Johnson, not surprisingly, said banks “absolutely take privacy and security very seriously” and that figures from the study that claim that 24 percent of banks had a data breach in 2016 are false. “We’ve always been looked at as a model for security,” Johnson added, before adding that banks are “held out as a template for other sectors to abide by in terms of security.”

Phil Lieberman, chief executive officer of Lieberman Software, told IBS Intelligence that while banks try, it’s stupid mistakes that often result in security issues. “Most of the serious intrusions are from dumb mistakes made by companies that are easily remediated by a consistent approach to managing access, security and looking for significant anomalies.”

Photo: Pixabay

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