Fergie's Tech Blog

Report: Banking Websites Full of Online Design Flaws

An AP newswire article by Jordan Robertson, via USA Today, reports that:

Many U.S. banks are unwittingly training their online customers to take risks with their passwords and other sensitive account information, leaving them more vulnerable to fraud, research shows.

The result is that even the most security-conscious Web surfers could find themselves the victims of identity theft because they have been conditioned to ignore potential clues about whether the banking site they're visiting is real — or a bogus site served up by hackers.

That's the conclusion by University of Michigan researchers who found design flaws in 76% of the 214 U.S. financial institution websites they studied.

The study, to be presented Friday at a security conference, examined the sites of top banks and smaller institutions alike. The researchers aren't detailing which banks had problems, however.

posted by Fergie @ 7/23/2008 01:27:00 PM