Banking is a necessary part of our lives. With the changing time, banks have evolved and gone through massive transformations. Banks modernized themselves by using new age technologies like by building advanced ATMs and providing user-friendly mobile apps. Mobile Banking Apps provide easier and faster transactions, instant updates and notifications, and easy access to the accounts and other mobile services anytime, anywhere. Even after these revolutionary changes, the main essence of Bank-Customer relationship remains the same i.e. reliable and secure operations.
However, as the banks are advancing, they are becoming more prone to security threats. User’s precious information and money might be stolen if these Web solutions for Banking are not secure. Mobile Apps are the target of many malicious attacks specifically the Banking Apps. Lousy mobile app practices neglect guidelines from the service provider where user’s banking details are revealed to services in the cloud. Mobile banking apps are particularly aimed here, which is a matter of serious concern because of the sensitivity of the data such apps generate.
Therefore, banks need to imply proper plans to ensure security of their customers. Thankfully, there are many ways to protect the Mobile Banking Apps to protect from breach by any external source. Here are some tips to assure safety of these Apps.
Strong Customer Authentication
The major concern, which arises with the use of pioneer bank mobile app, is that an unauthorized person can breach and stole important information when users login. They might get control over user’s account and might use it for fraudulent transactions. One single password is not enough for secure App usage. Hence, a different approach named ‘Multi Factor Verification’ is becoming popular. It requires evidences from the users to verify their identity in addition to the single password. These additional authentications may include randomly generated one-time password, a biometric factor like thumbprint, facial recognition, retinal scan etc. or a simple secret question earlier selected by the authorized user.
Authentication Attempts and Time out
Limiting the number of attempts and restricting the authentication time would be very useful to prevent breaching. Apps should have this as a security feature where user has to re-authenticate when there is a failed attempt to access the account and services. This may also include authentication time out where user should explicitly sign in within a certain time limit otherwise has to re-authenticate
Transactions Monitoring
The Banking Apps should provide security features to individual fraud policies to monitor the transaction. The information of transactions, that the sensors on the handset receive or scanning capabilities that monitor the environment in which the application is operating, are helpful in monitoring the transactions. For examples, GPS location, device fingerprinting capability, SIM card swap detection.
Secure Means of Transaction/Connection Encryption
Nowadays all networks encrypt all traffic to ensure safe internet usage. All application specifically Banking Apps should be secured by using end-to-end encryption. The back-end applications should use HTTPS protocol to connect. In addition, the apps should have this special feature where it should not connect to other domains, which are not on the clients list.
Behavior analysis
Different users generally have different app using behavior. Some users use these Apps for accessing all banking services and some use it only for a few selected tasks. The Mobile Banking App developers can utilize this information to analyze the behavior of individual users and in case of any doubt, can ask user for re-authentication.
Protection from Screen Scrapping
In screen scraping, the hackers collects the display data of the screen from any application and translates it for other application. Mobile Banking Apps (APIs) should implement technology that prevent screen scrapping. The anti-scraping solution must be used having these three measures: prevent, detect, and recover.
Customer awareness
Customers should be aware of fraud emails that ask for the information like share access ID, user name, passwords. They should not use personal details as access ID, user name or passwords. They must avoid using public computers and Wi-Fi to access the internet-banking portal. Banks should also issue guidelines for customers for safer use of Banking Apps.
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