By Will Sturgeon, 9 January 2006 16:25
NEWS
Barclays Bank is urging customers of its online service to download security software which is provided as part of a tie-up with Finnish antivirus vendor F-Secure.
The tools available to download on the online banking site include anti-spyware protection and rootkit detection as well as a traditional antivirus product.
The bank will charge customers £16.95 for the antivirus protection, or £27.95 for the more comprehensive package.
Although those charges represent approximately a 30 per cent discount on the retail price, many proponents of such an offering argue that banks could actually absorb the costs of a 100 per cent subsidy by virtue of the savings they would make from reimbursing losses which result from digital identity theft.
David Mitchell, senior operations manager at Barclays, said: "Our aim is to act as responsibly towards our customers as possible. When it comes to online banking, this means not just ensuring that our own processes are completely secure but also that the customer's own PC is protected, so the whole transaction is totally safe."
Mitchell said it is important banks and online retailers take whatever steps they can now, to restore confidence in online transactions.
Brian Gregory, internet security business manager at F-Secure, said: "The hope is that many people will consider using the software to ensure their transactions are fully protected, so that their personal data is kept secure."
Comments
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1. anonymous
What Barclays AND ALL the other banks need to be doing is watching and shutting down the Phishing e-mails using security alerts purporting to be from the bank AND shutting down the websites who are scamming customers !!
2. James Button
Perhaps they should indicate the reduced tax paid because of the losses due to fraudulent actions that the government is NOT requiring the ISP's to address.
Then the Government might take effective action!
If the ISP's were charged with, and fined per incident, ensuring that emails delivered are from the source specified on the email, then they would implement some secure tracking.
Me, I'd agree to them checking the email headers and not delivering any email where the source did not match that on the email.
That does require legislation allowing my local ISP to pass on the charge to whichever ISP ships fraudulent emails to them, and so on down the source path.
The final charge being to the owner of a source system - and "I was taken over as a 'bot' " is not acceptible unless the owner of that system can show that they had implemented what should have been adequate security measures.
Then we can address such problems as the recent WMF security glitch by holding organisations such as Microsoft responsible for supplying products with defects that make them not fit for the purpose of securely controlling an (on-line) computer system.