Archive for March 2010


BANK SUES VICTIMIZED CUSTOMER OVER CYBERCRIME

Monday, March 29th, 2010

When cyberthieves stole more than $800,000 from the accounts of a machine equipment company in Texas, one might expect the victim to seek redress from their bank. To date, such compensation for electronic banking losses has been exceedingly rare as banks have carefully avoided setting such a precedent. A number of victims have sued their banks in an attempt to recover their losses, but in this case the bank has set a new precedent: it has preemptively sued the victim.

InterComputer’s Trusted Banking solution is designed to prevent cybercrimes such as this case.

For more on this story, click here.

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ON-LINE BANKING SECURITY – HOW MANY FACTORS ARE ENOUGH?

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

On-line banking security is increasingly the subject of news reports of various types of cybercrime, usually involving electronic identity theft and the illegal transfer or diversion of funds from the victim’s bank account. As the problem grows in size, legal challenges are increasingly attempting to hold banks liable for losses from such crimes. Banks are, of course, very reluctant to accept such liabilities and are battling the problem with both legal and technological strategies.

Typically, banks are offering “two-factor authentication” as a de facto industry standard for on-line banking security. The following video, provided by ZD Net, clearly explains what two-factor security is and how it works:

The problem with two-factor security is that hackers have now discovered how to defeat it in real-time. The following article from the MIT Technology Review details an actual case where a construction company lost almost half a million dollars to such an attack:

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23488/?a=f

The authentication of a customer’s electronic identity and the correct application of the customer’s authority limits are the very reasons for on-line banking security. If either objective is not reached, the system has failed and the results can be disastrous.

InterComputer’s fully-insured InterOperating System (IOS) begins with a three-factor approach adding something the user is (a biometric measurement) in addition to something he knows and something he has. This approach, combined with many other design, architectural and procedural factors, combine to create an electronic “trusted path” and result in InterComputer’s IOS being the only underwritten electronic transaction system commercially available today.

To learn more about InterComputer’s Trusted Banking solution, click here.

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ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD SECURITY – HUGE CARROT, HUGE STICK

Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies face intense pressure to electronify medical information and health histories. This pressure is comprised of both a very big stick and a very big carrot.

The stick comes in the form of proliferating state and Federal laws mandating the safekeeping of electronic medical records (EMR). Last year, the hospital that treated the mother and babies in the famous “Octomom” case was unable to prevent unauthorized access to their medical records by the hospital’s own employees. California regulators fined the Kaiser Permanente hospital in Bellflower a total of $437,500 for failure to prevent just two instances of unauthorized access. Other prominent institutions, such as UCLA Medical Center, have suffered newsworthy failures to protect EMR information in the cases of Farah Fawcett, Britney Spears, Maris Shriver, and others. In addition to the financial damage such failures incur, hospitals are deeply concerned about the effects of adverse publicity on their reputation and about incurring big expenses in related legal actions.

The carrot comes in the form of a huge Federal earmark for $19 billion in stimulus money to incent the development and implementation of electronic medical records (EMR) technology.

InterComputer is working within the health care industry to address two major market requirements:

1. The need to control access to EMR in compliance with applicable Federal and state laws
2. The need to securely communicate and exchange documents among hospitals, doctors, and insurance companies

The InterComputer InterOperating System (IOS) is fully compatible with all major EMR solutions and applications and fully insured against loss due to cybercrime of any kind within the system. Its advanced user identity, authority delegation management, and secure messaging technologies, can absolutely prevent the kind of incidents that have proved so costly to Kaiser’s bottom line. IOS also delivers automated compliance with both HIPAA and SarbOx regulatory requirements.

To learn more about InterComputer’s EMR capability, click here.

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