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The WiKID Blog

Viewing posts from January, 2009

spear-phishing

IBM released the results of a security study showing a dramatic increase in phishing attacks that target specific individuals and institutions have increased dramatically.

spies-in-the-phishing-underground

There is a great article on the current state of phishing on net-secrurity.org. The article discusses phishing kits with backdoors (phishers phishing phishers), the market for identity information, the lack of sophistication of phishers and some recommendations:

We aren’t going to solve the problem of online PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and identify theft just by writing even more secure code (although it certainly helps), or by continuing to play whack-a-mole with phishers. The system of relying on static identifiers to commit financial transactions needs to be rethought.
And:
Commercial financial institutions such as credit card companies and banks realize that the cost of implementing a new system that does not merely rely on static identifiers is higher than the fraud committed, so they decide to accept the cost. This is the reason why the system has not changed. Unfortunately, financial institutions only take into account their cost when making this decision, but it also ends up affecting the lives of millions of people who have to pay with their identities when such fraud is committed (this cost is also shared by other companies that want to have the capacity to process transactions. The PCI standard is a good example of this situation).
The expectation is that the band-aid approach will continue to be applied until the costs exceed the expense of two-factor authentication.

targeting-with-the-tools-you-have

I have (just last post :) suggested before that the first systems to get true two-factor authentication will be the high-value brokerage and commercial accounts, pointing to Online Banking Solutions as being ahead of the curve in protecting their customers' customers.

stealing-real-identities-to-earn-virtual-items-to

The ability to sell virtual items earned in virtual worlds for actual money is creating identity theft problems, particularly in Korea.

student-interest-in-wikid

We get a good number of hits from .edu domains and I was recently asked by a student about using WiKID for a class project on two-factor authentication. This is great and highly encouraged. Feel free to download the commercial server and test it for educational purposes. Obviously, you can really look under the hood of the open source version

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