ING new Tool for Safe E-Banking

28 May 2008

Doing banking in an infected PC is a nightmare for many customers all over the world. With E banking concept catching up aggressively, banks have been looking for fully secured banking transaction facilities for their customers. Considering this challenge, ING Direct, America’s largest online-only bank is planning to bring out a software tool that would allow customers to bank online safely at ING, even if the user's PC was already infected with data-stealing malicious software.

ING has given shape for the software in association with an Israeli company named Trusteer, which offers an installable program called Rapport. Their plan is for creating a "secure pipe" within the user's computer that encapsulates data as it flows to the ING Direct Web site. The software would work by assuming control over the application programming interfaces or APIs in Windows, the set of tools which allow software developers to create programs that interact with key Windows functionalities.

The new software examines vital Windows APIs to see if any other process is trying to intercept sensitive data. It then blocks those that do. Company has developed the software by analyzing all the different channels and methods in which attackers can grab credentials from the computer or tamper with communications and shaped a technology that addresses all these threats the same way using the same techniques.

.According to a report in Washington Post Rapport uses the combination of customer ID and PIN to compute a "hash" value or unique fingerprint tied to those credentials. The software then looks to see if any data matching that hash value is entered in at any site other than ING's. If so, it throws up a warning to the user that they might be trying to enter their ING credentials at a phishing site, and blocks the transmission of that data.