Hackers playing with poor banking system

Islamabad : The cable fraud has incessantly been weighing up severe financial losses of billions of rupees to the banking customers for a decade but the units responsible for the protection of their banking sector from the hackers, have turned out to be helpless to fight against the technology used by the hackers to steal money from bank accounts.

The incidents of cyber-attacks on the banking system by the local hackers in the country is growing alarmingly, the intermittent SMS messages being sent to the account holders are clearly not enough and does not absolve the banks from their responsibility to protect their customers and clients.

The nimble-fingered hackers are active in the country to transfer bank clients by using virtual technology to get personal identity number (PIN). The gangs of fraudulent, anyhow, get secret indicators of the bank clients after tracing secrecies of their bank accounts on phones pretending themselves as their bankers and easily transfer heavy amounts to their accounts.

“The hackers are operating their system from abroad or function from far flung areas of the country, neither they can be traced, nor hunted down,” an officers of the investigation agency said when contacted to inquire the reasons of ignoring the sensitive issue of hacking.

It is evident that so far the banks have been unable to ward off the attacks launched by hackers as a result of which people are losing millions and millions of rupees every month. The situation makes it imperative for the banks to employ technology and strengthen the firewalls they have put in place to prevent hackers from logging into the bank accounts of their clients.

Again it is noticed that the firewalls put in place by the banks to prevent hackers from accessing a bank account are not strong enough. In the present system a client accessing his or her bank account electronically there are not enough security checks.

The banks are required to create a multiple cross check security system, at least three tier if not more, under which any person trying to access ones account must answer certain queries from the system and the confirmation to each step must be instantly communicated through SMS as well as emails to the client.

The final access to the account for any transaction should be allowed only after verification of certain codes communicated by the banks to the client through SMS on the registered phone as well as email provided by the client to the bank. These codes should comprise of numeric as well as alphabets and even those should be cross checked at least two times for further authentication. It is clear that only asking the date of birth and mothers’ name is not enough of a security arrangement.

The electronic passwords or authentication codes should be for one time access only and should be changed for each transaction. This may sound a cumbersome procedure but may prove an effective part of the firewall the banks employ to prevent hacker’s attacks on their system.

“Hackers are playing with entire financial telecom system of banking organism by hacking access to the accounts secret information of the account holders and transfer heavy amounts in their banks, even, in the foreign countries,” a bank officer dealing with such cases, said when asked.

From finance to digital asset management, technology plays an undeniable role in disrupting conventional patterns and revolutionizing them by proffering new solutions. Consequently, technology continues to change every aspect of the world, and our day-to-day activities are becoming more digitalized than ever in the history of humanity.

One of such areas of our daily activities that have been revolutionized by technology is a personal finance, especially regarding saving money. The traditional model of saving money in cabinets has been scrapped for more digitalized methods.

However, technology is not without its cons, given that peculiar risks associated with technology deployment, such as cyber-attacks, have gradually become a norm across public and private sectors. More importantly, cyber-attacks were rated the fifth top risk in 2020. The less the risk of detection, the more susceptible banks and private and public institutions are to cyber-attacks. This seeming paradox thus begs the question.

The hackers get access to the bank accounts of the victims by using various tools and technologies.

Scammers gain access to your personally identifiable information (PII) through phishing attacks, data breaches, or other scams. Then, they use that information to gain access to your bank account and steal your money.

If you guess scammers have your bank account number and you’re a victim of identity theft, immediately check your bank statements for unexpected charges and activity. Keep a documented list of any unusual behaviour or transaction that you do not recognize.

Call your bank and freeze your accounts, as precautionary measures, contact the your bank and explain the situation ask to freeze or cancel your accounts and issue you new cards and account numbers.

Freeze your credit with all the major reporting offices, report the fraud individually to your banks and ask them to freeze your credit file and lodge a complaint with the concerned police station to indicate that you are the victim of a fraud crime.

Change your online banking passwords to protect yourself from further financial harm by securing your online accounts with stronger passwords and multi-factor or two-factor authentication and take on signing up for an all-in-one digital security solution.

But the bank will not accept responsibility and liability for of the rip-off and stealing amount from your account.

The banking and other financial institutions believe that the victim is not liable for charges that scammers make with your bank account details and the scammers have committed a crime and most banks won’t victimize you further by demanding that you pay for the crime from your own bank account.

But, it is a fact that the naive victims provide their secret data to the talented hackers on their queries in the guise of their bankers. s