Jay Butler, Senior Technical Consultant
In last quarter’s installment, we looked at ten ways computer users can help prevent malware as a human supplement to the electronic security layers deployed at your financial institution. Those guidelines are also helpful in thwarting email born phishing attacks that slip past security, but they are essentially useless against vishing or smishing. Phishing attacks are known as vishing when a criminal attempts to trick their victim into revealing private information over the phone; the smishing method uses text messages.
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Jay Butler, Senior Technical Consultant
Simple end user education may be a financial institution’s best defense against cyber attacks and social engineering. Our clients employ numerous security layers on their computer networks to thwart dubious activity; however, no amount of technology can prevent every attack because the possibilities are practically limitless and ever-changing. End users armed with a few basic concepts can serve as another powerful security layer to help prevent malware infestation on their machines and to outsmart scammers. I have compiled a list of simple things your users can do to help protect the best interest of your financial institution with regard to common questionable activity they may encounter. By no means does this list cover everything, but I believe training works best in small increments. Consider passing this list out to all of your users and even to other people you know.
Follow these 10 Steps to Help Protect Your Desktop from Malware and Avoid Leaking Private Information:
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Curt Frierson, Chief Technology Officer
A guide to overcoming the traditional obstacles while cutting costs.
Current Disaster Recovery Landscape
Real-world disasters over the past few years such as Hurricanes Katrina, Ike, and Rita have created an increased focus on the issues of disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity for financial institutions and have led to increased regulatory scrutiny in these areas. Faced with this growing demand, most institutions have at least documented a disaster recovery plan. Although this is a step in the right direction, having a documented plan does not necessarily mean that your institution could recover effectively from a major disruption, much less be able to continue operations through the disaster. The simplest way to measure your current disaster preparedness is to ask the following question:
“Do you have complete confidence in your institution’s ability to recover from a disaster?”
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Over the past two days, Safe Systems Engineers have detected two new trends in spam emails. As these are both new threats, they have been able to make it through email filters and to users’ mailboxes. As always, Safe Systems strives to keep you informed of the newest threats, to allow you to better manage your financial institution’s systems.
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Zach Duke, EVP Business Development
- Perform a Business Impact Analysis. The Business Impact Analysis (BIA) rates management’s tolerance for downtime by each department. By performing the BIA, the institution will be able to prioritize the departments that need to be operational in order of criticality. Make sure you periodically reevaluate your BIA. Tolerance for downtime can change from year to year.
- Have an inventory of your equipment including servers, workstations, and peripherals. This is important documentation when a disaster strikes both for the recovery of systems and insurance purposes. As part of our NetComply service, we have a detailed report of your servers and workstations (and the devices connected to them, i.e. scanners, printers, etc.), but make sure you have your DVR and phone systems monitored and/or inventoried as well.
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Jamie Davis, Education and Product Manager
Every single work day when my mom walks into her insurance branch of four employees, she is responsible for the same mundane, yet still highly critical task: she must take a backup tape out of the server and put a new tape in. She does this every day (when she remembers). Sometimes these tapes make it off site. Sometimes these tapes are locked in a drawer. Sometimes these tapes are put on top of the server. Each time she thinks: “There has to be a better way.”
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Jay Butler, Senior Technical Consultant
With the passage of Check 21 in 2004, Financial Institutions (FI) have been racing to establish competitive advantage through products like Branch Capture, Teller Capture, ATM Capture, Consumer Capture, Merchant Capture, and even Mobile Capture. Recent economic challenges have accelerated the proliferation of Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) because many FI’s have honed in on RDC as a method to grow core deposits. Driving forces such as consumer convenience and business profit are the same forces that slow the development and implementation of strong security. Tight security controls are neither cheap nor convenient for the business or the consumer, so security often lags behind. I hope this brief article will increase awareness about RDC compliance because the new fervor around RDC is sure to perk up the interest of auditors in 2010.
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Jay Butler, Senior Technical Consultant
Some of you were probably around when new accounts were opened on dumb terminals and teller transactions were processed on a glorified calculator. You know the faded, manila-colored, monitor/keyboards of the mean, green-screen machines, and the fancy calculators that could print receipts (sometimes). Commonly used before the introduction of actual desktop computers, these things must have been the first step up from just hand writing everything. I don’t know, I wasn’t around before then. I started my IT career with community financial institutions during the technical revolution of Windows 3.1 desktops and Novell Netware 3 file servers. The environment of centralized mainframe with connected dumb terminals had been mostly replaced by a distributed network of servers and desktop computers.
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Jay Butler, Senior Technical Consultant
Your financial institution employs a sophisticated technology infrastructure to facilitate the provision of a broad array of modern financial services. The implementation and ongoing maintenance of all the components involved presents a complicated challenge that relies heavily on teamwork at all levels. Vendor relationships comprise one important aspect of the teamwork dynamic.
At Safe Systems, we endeavor to take responsibility for all our financial institution clients’ technical needs, including the coordination of other vendor efforts, along with providing services specific to our core competencies. Our goal is to ease the burden through leveraging our expertise in acting on our clients’ behalf as their ambassador to their various technology vendors. We exercise this role primarily during network installation projects, support events, and major software upgrades.
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August 12, 2010 1:02 pm | 
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