Recently two bank fraud incidents have been reported one from State Bank of Mysore in Karnataka and another from Bank of Baroda in Lucknow where security specialists have suspected hacking of the Bank’s servers without any compromise of information at the POS or the customer side.
Reference:
Hindu and Hindu Business Line on SBM fraud
TOI on BOB fraud : P.S: Though this was a case of hacking into dormant accounts by an insider, there is a failure of information security even in this fraud.
In the background of these frauds, one can read the article in Kasparesky published a few months back titled: “Dozens of banks lose millions to cybercriminals attacks” and “APT-Style bank robberies on the increase..“
This article states that Kasparesky which exposed a sophisticated bank fraud gang last year by name Carabanak has now identified threats from of two more gangs by name Metel (or Corkow) and GCMAN. It also said that Carabanak has reemerged with new targets. Some of these attacks indicate a spear phishing attacks on the Bank employees.
It appears that the recent attacks in India may indicate the activity similar to what has been reported here.
One of the strategies that is reportedly used is to first gain access to one of the user’s computer and plant a trojan. The trojan may crash some application such as Microsoft Word and it is expected that the admin will be called to set things right. When the admin logs into the victim’s computer with his password, his credentials are captured by the attackers. Using this, the attackers slowly get into other systems until they are able to compromise the fund transfer systems leading to further frauds.
What we have seen in SBM now with small amounts being transferred may be only a testing of the fraud and we may soon see a major break in SBM which may shake the Bank and put its customers into great pain. May be similar threat is there in other banks also.
The recent failure of basic information security principles in an otherwise reputed company like TCS leading to a Rs 6000 crore damage on the Bank is an indication that most of the companies (including the Banks) have very weak security culture.
Additionally the opening of Unified Payment Interface opens up the mobile network to one part of the Banking servers which can be used by hackers to worm their way up the network into the core banking servers and launch a major attack to bring down a bank.
Knowing the attitude of Banks and RBI, nothing constructive is expected to be done to prevent such attacks and hence it would not be long when this prognosis may sadly come true.
I would therefore advise Bank customers to manage their risks by ensuring that they spread out their bank balances into multiple Banks and ensure that all the eggs are not in a single basket. Better still, spread it across smaller banks including cooperative banks without internet and mobile banking so that their hard earned savings are protected.
Naavi
