SSL and internet security news

banking

Auto Added by WPeMatico

Regulating Bitcoin

Ross Anderson has a new paper on cryptocurrency exchanges. From his blog:

Bitcoin Redux explains what’s going wrong in the world of cryptocurrencies. The bitcoin exchanges are developing into a shadow banking system, which do not give their customers actual bitcoin but rather display a “balance” and allow them to transact with others. However if Alice sends Bob a bitcoin, and they’re both customers of the same exchange, it just adjusts their balances rather than doing anything on the blockchain. This is an e-money service, according to European law, but is the law enforced? Not where it matters. We’ve been looking at the details.

The paper.

Powered by WPeMatico

June 5, 2018 academicpapers, banking, bitcoin, cryptocurrency, economicsofsecurity, Security technology Read more >

TSB Bank Disaster

This seems like an absolute disaster:

The very short version is that a UK bank, TSB, which had been merged into and then many years later was spun out of Lloyds Bank, was bought by the Spanish bank Banco Sabadell in 2015. Lloyds had continued to run the TSB systems and was to transfer them over to Sabadell over the weekend. It’s turned out to be an epic failure, and it’s not clear if and when this can be straightened out.

It is bad enough that bank IT problem had been so severe and protracted a major newspaper, The Guardian, created a live blog for it that has now been running for two days.

The more serious issue is the fact that customers still can’t access online accounts and even more disconcerting, are sometimes being allowed into other people’s accounts, says there are massive problems with data integrity. That’s a nightmare to sort out.

Even worse, the fact that this situation has persisted strongly suggests that Lloyds went ahead with the migration without allowing for a rollback.

This seems to be a mistake, and not enemy action.

Powered by WPeMatico

April 27, 2018 banking, dataprotection, Security technology Read more >

Bank Robbery Tactic

This video purports to be a bank robbery in Kiev. He first threatens a teller, who basically ignores him because she’s behind bullet-proof glass. But then the robber threatens one of her co-workers, who is on his side of the glass. Interesting example of a security system failing for an unexpected reason.

The video is weird, though. The robber seems very unsure of himself, and never really points the gun at anyone or even holds it properly.

Powered by WPeMatico

August 14, 2017 banking, robbery, Security technology, threatmodels Read more >