Warning: Don’t reuse your Internet banking username or password!
Subscribe to SeekBroadband
Get the latest news, special offers, reviews and more.NB. We will never pass your email onto third parties.
Subscribe in a reader
A report out today from Trusteer, a customer protection service for online businesses, showed that a large number of customers reuse their internet banking user credentials across other non-banking websites and services.
Over two thirds (73 percent) of users were found to reuse their password on at least one other website. Almost half of users use both their login name and password on other websites.
This is giving criminals new ways of getting bank login details by harvesting data from other, less secure websites. They can then test this information on various banking websites, and if successful, enable them to commit bank fraud.
The most obvious advice would be to never reuse the same username and password that customers have for internet banking anywhere else.
Trusteer also recommends that users maintain 3 sets of credentials. One to use with internet banking websites, one for non-financial websites that hold personal information about an individual and one for non-sensitive websites that do hold any personal information.
If a user however logs on to more than one Internet banking service, they should ideally have a unique set of credentials for each.
The report was collated from over 4 millions of users across North America and Europe that use Trusteer’s Rapport browser security service.
Buying