7CHIP: Phone Spoofing:How to avoid Phone Spoofing-How to protect your Bank Account

These are cell phone scams aimed at hacking an online bank accounts. Scammers are getting account info by making calls and texts that come in, looking like they are from your bank. Security experts say this is a fast growing problem.

So, what happens actually with telephone banking – you make a call to your bank to make some fund transfer or check your balance, and the bank recognizes your caller id, they recognize the phone number you are calling from. Caller id spoofing is a technology that can actually pose as your phone. And when that occurs it gives to a bad guy some form of access to your telephone banking.

What else happens is the criminals are doing their own reconnaissance. They are getting identifying information about you through your social media. They get your mother’s maiden name, etc. They get answers to those knowledge based questions that generally are used to reset passwords, and to gain access to certain accounts.

One advice would be to change up those knowledge based questions and answers whatever those questions are. If the question is: ‘What cookies do you like?’ and you say: “I like such and such cookies,” and if you have those answers in your Facebook page, you probably want to change that.

Do mind information you put in social media, as it can be used to gain access to telephone and online banking.

Other thing is to get a security for your smart phone. Antivirus for mobiles is really important now. Android operating system is very vulnerable to malware. And beyond that, be careful with what links you click in SMS text messages and e-mails, that you receive via your mobile phone because they can have links that can infect your phone.

Another issue is that people keep too much information on these devices. People often have passwords there, images, documents. According to recent study by McAfee, 30% of mobile phone users don’t even put a lock on their phone, meaning that if they loose it, then somebody has full access to it.

And most of mobile phones are used primarily to access online banking, social media, PayPal account and other accounts, if bad guys get access to stored information, that access can compromise all those existing accounts.

Today scammers are attacking personal and corporate banking accounts, although companies and private accounts have a lot of money, banks are really where all the money is, and having that money as just bits and bytes in databases, makes banks servers and backend services a very desirable target. Here is a transcript of an interesting speech on different simple ways hackers can put their hands onbanks servers.

Alex Lamman is a 25 years old software engineer, snowboarder and just a loving father from Germany. He is Internet security addict and helps to run Privacy PC website.