Internet Banking – A Layered Approach to Security

Abstract

The advent and popularity of the Internet presented the banking industry with both a challenge and an opportunity to utilise this medium. Although internet banking offered customers the comfort of accessing their accounts from any place, there has been fear of exploitation of the inherent weakness in the technology. The opportunity was there to “take the bank to the customers’ place” while the challenge lay in changing the mindset of the customers to begin to ‘trust’ and accept this system. The task was to ensure translation of the unquantifiable trust to a more palpable security to the system. This scenario, combined with the basic flow of the Internet banking system, has made us propose a holistic approach to security. Each layer of the Internet Banking has its own risks that can be mitigated through the use of the suggested control mechanisms thereby enabling defence-in-depth, thus prompting the concept of a layered approach to security.