Banks employing variety of tools to collect impulses of cyber attacks: experts

LAHORE: Banks in Pakistan are practicing variety of tools to collect impulses of cyber attacks, said banking sector experts.

They said these tools included electronic observation platforms, terrestrial intelligence and aircraft such as call recording, stage satellites etc.

Muhammad Ahsan Raza, an expert, said the pirated copies of credit card information can be accessed in two configurations. First, he said, credits such as full name, address, phone number, card number, and expiration date can be easily used by someone for illegal online purchases. The second configuration is represented by the scanned dumps, he added.

Jawad Hussain, another expert, said there are several forms of attacks; however, the most commonplace security attacks are described as denial of service attacks, brute-force attacks, browser attacks, shellshock attacks, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) attack, backdoor attacks, message manipulation, interruption of internal communication, information attack, and hardware/tool attack.

Another expert Tanvir Fatima said a cyber crime and security survey report suggests that injecting malware, phishing, computer theft and bot attacks are common approaches to cyber-attacks to attain sensitive material and thus cause damage to organizations.

She said mobile banking is one of the latest improvements in the banking sector. This means that customers and banks communicate online. According to her, banks' clients now choose online facilities because they are more suitable, inexpensive and easier and quicker to use.

There was also the introduction of mobile money transfer via mobile networks and in Pakistan via services such as MobiCash and Easypaisa. Therefore, she said, banking services has made accessible to many people using technology by improving user-friendliness and availability.

Despite the advantages, she said, it has been found that many applications based on smartphones are not security-oriented and often do not comply with best practices.

According to estimates, some 38.5 billion devices are connected to the Internet to generate and disseminate confidential information worldwide by 2020.

It may be noted that leading banks in Pakistan with largest networks are affected by cyber attacks one after another. The number of affected cards of these banks runs into thousands.

According to experts, the hackers were found physically willing to check and scan the details of the card at an ATM or a compromised commercial computer or trade machine for illegal trade.

They said the banking sector all over the world faces the most common two factors, including heterogeneous data where modified device use standardized and different protocols for communication purpose. Secondly, they aid, the large number of events where a multitude of information and events flow into data and communication systems.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2020