This week, the world acknowledged the importance of protecting users’ data as part of International Privacy Day 2015. Commenting on this occasion are two experts in the field of information security: Mark Noctor, Director of Sales EMEA for Arxan Technologies; and Richard Anstey, CTO EMEA for Intralinks.
Mark Noctor, Director of Sales EMEA, Arxan Technologies:
“In observance of Data Protection Day and the work of organisations to ensure that the correct security measures are in place, it is important to highlight the increased risks on mobile platforms in the banking and payments sector. We predict that the security risks in the financial sector will be a key threat area for 2015, and with this in mind, it is vital that mobile application security takes priority as bank, payment providers, and customers seek to do more on mobile devices.
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“Findings from our recent State of Security report showed that 95% of the top 100 Android financial apps and 70% of iOS apps have been hacked in the past year. With this in mind, we would advise banking and payment customers who are considering the use of a mobile financial application to take the following steps to increase security:
– Download banking and payment applications only from certified app stores.
– Ask your financial institution or payment provider if their app is protected against ‘reverse engineering.’
– Don’t connect to an email, bank, or other sensitive account over public Wi-Fi. If that’s unavoidable—because you spend a lot of time in cafés, hotels, or airports, for example—pay for access to a virtual private network that will significantly improve your privacy on public networks.
– Ask your bank or mobile payment provider if they have deployed application self-protections for the apps they have released in app stores. Don’t rely only on mobile anti-virus, anti-spam, or your enterprise-wide device security solutions to protect apps that reside on your mobile device from hacking or malware attacks.
“Data Protection Day is more important than ever, with the app economy in the financial sector rapidly expanding and everything from payment transactions to brokering now occurring on the mobile platform. With mobile banking becoming a main fixture in the financial sector, it is important for application security to be treated as a top priority so that data privacy protections are continuously upheld.”
Richard Anstey, CTO EMEA, Intralinks:
“Many people bring bad security habits from home into business. So educating consumers isn’t just about protecting them but protecting our economy.
“Telling people to use strong passwords may even be counter-intuitive as it creates a false sense of security which people bring to work. When dealing with very sensitive information, such as IP, people need to know about very secure measures, such as information rights management. Security is about knowing what the danger is and how to deploy the appropriate level of protection.
“If we want a truly data-secure society, we need to start by ensuring people know what value their data has. Only then can they make informed decision about how to secure it.”
The opinions expressed in this post belong to the individual contributors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Information Security Buzz.