climate and comms

FIDO or Fast Identity Online was launched last week by a couple of Internet big hitters most notably PayPal.   They clearly have a vested interest in ensuring that their transactions are secure.     FIDO aims to provide specifications or standards to the industry that embody  an approach to authentication which starts to move away from the ‘security by obscurity ‘  or user name/password paradigm prevalent today.   The main reason why the incidence of hacking is sky-rocketing.   [ Twitter Hacked ] FIDO aims to leverage hardware devices such as phones and tablets as well as fingerprint readers, webcams, TPM ( Trusted Platform Module)  chips and tokens into an open-standard whereby there will be inter-operability between different systems but which comply to the standard.   A client/server architecture in combination with some hardware fingerprint starts to approach a much more secure approach th...

Not a good week for NatWest innovative banking services.  NatWest Get Cash fraud   ( Get Cash Pulled ) A combination of a simple phishing attack and a fundamentally insecure service led to many users of the Get Cash service ( a sub set of the NatWest mobile banking app – powered by Monitise) being defrauded of cash from their accounts.    The system allows users to get cash from an ATM by keying in a ‘secure cash code’ into the terminal.    The assumption is that once you have logged in to your app you are legit and so you ping the system for the code.   A user name and password level of security – that’s it!.   No better than 99% of all apps on the Net today.    Needless to say the service was shut down once the fraud started becoming rampant.    Does the drive for customer convenience completely outweigh basic security rules. ?   The problem with this kind of solution and others that rely on the presentation ...

Many of you have probably wondered about what Live Ensure is all about.  Well there is no more powerful medium than multi-media.  So watch this video ... let me know what you think