BNC National Bank, an innovative national bank serving customers in North Dakota, Arizona, and Minnesota, is improving online security to help protect customers from cyber thieves targeting online banking users of ACH and wire transfer services.
Industry analyst firm Gartner estimates that cyber criminals have stolen more than $3 billion from banks, business and municipalities in the United States using financial malware. The bank will be proactively offering IronKey Trusted Access to its commercial cash management customers, enabling secure access to the BNC online banking site and protecting clients at the point most vulnerable to malware -- their own PCs.
Trusted Access allows the bank to meet and exceed new Federal Financial Institutions Examinations Council (FFIEC) guidance with which all financial institutions must comply in 2012 to reduce their risk of online banking fraud. All of BNC's ACH and wire transfer customers will be asked to use the IronKey Trusted Access software by the bank.
"It is important for us to provide products and services that not only meet the financial needs of our customers but their security needs as well. With Trusted Access we know that they are protected against the latest attacks, even on their own PC," said Shawn Cleveland, BNC National Bank's chief operating officer.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) estimates that 39 percent of all computers are infected with crimeware designed to steal personal and account information. According to real-time research from SpyEye Tracker(1), today's anti-malware software fails to detect these kinds of threats at least 75 percent of the time. The FFIEC has found that these attacks compromise "virtually all forms of authentication." As a result, online account take overs are growing at a rate of 150 percent each year based upon research published by the Financial Service Information Sharing and Analyst Center (FS-ISAC).
Trusted Access combines the use of software and cloud-based services. The software can either be downloaded or run from a secure USB device. The Trusted Access Platform provides financial institutions with multiple layers of security integrated to dramatically reduce the risk of online banking fraud. Trusted Access launches a protected, virtualized operating system and Web browser that will only work with IronKey's Trusted Network, which when deployed, only allows the end user to access bank-approved sites from the secure browser. The secure Web browser protects online banking sessions from both known and unknown crimeware. Unlike other approaches, Trusted Access assumes a client's computer is already infected with the latest zero-day attack that would go undetected by anti-virus and other software technologies. Even if a computer is infected with malware, IronKey Trusted Access keeps the online banking session safe, secure and private.
"BNC National Bank is taking proactive measures to protect the bank's valuable reputation in the community as well as their customers from a problem that is costing the industry billions of dollars every year," said Arthur Wong, CEO of IronKey. "With IronKey Trusted Access, the bank is meeting the new FFIEC guidelines and providing its customers an effective means to prevent online banking fraud."