• New way of entering online passwords for brokerage houses

    12 Mar 2008

    I just heard on the Clark Howard radio show that online brokerage firms are moving towards Web authentication technologies that require you to enter your password with your mouse. This is presumably to help keep the bad guys from gleaning your login credentials using keystroke loggers.

    I hear about this all the time – especially in the brokerage industry – where the bad guys capture your user name and password (off a malware-infected computer, via an unprotected wireless network, or some other lame Web application vulnerability that the brokerage house hasn’t bothered to discover) and then execute the equivalent of an online pump and dump scheme. The criminals login, sell lots of the victim’s current shares of stock (typically penny stocks), and then use that money to buy junk stocks the criminal owns to effectively “pump” up the value. Once the value goes up, the criminal sells his shares of the junk stock and makes off with tons of cash.

    Can you believe that out of ALL the government regulations we have for computer privacy and security and that there’s nothing to protect the consumer against this!?

    I suspect we’ll eventually see regulations protecting consumers against this. Given the arms race between the bad guys and everyone else, I’m sure we’ll also see ways to exploit this “mouse authentication” process as well.

    Ah, the joys of information security…

Resources

view all

Client Testimonials

“A business associate referred our company to Principle Logic when we were seeking a resource to perform vulnerability /penetration testing for our external and internal networks. We found Kevin Beaver to be professional, well informed, and easy to work with. His testing did not disrupt our networks, and his progress updates were timely.

His final report was very thorough and included security recommendations for our network environment. The executive leadership was so impressed with Kevin’s security expertise, they have extended their agreement to continue to perform periodic testing. We highly recommend Kevin Beaver and Principle Logic as a resource for network security testing.”

(IT managed services firm)
Read More

 

I’ve written/co-written 12 books on information security including:

 

Tags

application security appsec basics books careers censorship CISO CISSP cities compliance coronavirus covid-19 cybersecurity data breaches hacking Hacking For Dummies heads in sand health incident response information risk keynote speaker leadership macOS networked cameras passwords patching racing resilience Russian hacking SDLC security culture security leadership security program management security speaker selling security social engineering speaking engagements spec miata sql injection tiktok time management training vulnerability and penetration testing web security

© Copyright 2001-present, Principle Logic, LLC - All Rights Reserved.

For your convenience I accept