| |
Three Banks Rated Highly Secure, But Is It Enough?
In September Javelin Strategy and Research released its evaluation of 24 major banks that combined comprise 60 percent of the financial market in the United States. Three institutions - Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Washington Mutual - ranked highest in their efforts to prevent identity theft.
Bank of America led the pack with its "two-factor" authentication system. The Federal Deposit and Insurance Corporation recommended in 2005 that all major financial entities improve online banking security through two level systems and mandated compliance by the end of 2006.
Although these banks are the best of the pack, they are far from perfect, with data losses and security breaches occurring far more often than customers may realize. JP Morgan Chase recently admitted that its credit card division, Chase Card Services, lost 2.6 million Circuit City cardholder records, which were taken to a landfill and buried by mistake.
In 2005 Bank of America faced numerous data breaches with one o f the most serious being the loss of data on 145,000 military and government cardholders. In addition employees were implicated in scams to sell customer records to collection agencies and finally, a laptop filled with information on the Visa Buxx card program for teenagers (now discontinued) went missing.
In February 2005 ChoicePoint admitted that 145,000 of its records were sold to identity thieves in Nigeria. The company was fined $15 million by the Federal Trade Commission but those funds have not yet been distributed to any of the victims of the scheme.
A tally of incidents of data breaches and identity theft incidents maintained by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse shows an alarming 94 million customer records have been lost, exposed to exploitation, or stolen since February 2005.
So, while the Javelin study points to improvements in password methodology, site login strategies, and similar protective measures, the overall security level of the industry remains too low to provide a guarantee against identity theft to its customers.
|
|
|
