Been wondering as our BT landline is going ...
We used to use this for Bank transfers and wonder if the Internet and Mobile phones are safe? I sort of presume that secure end to end encryption is being used?
thanks Gary
I'm sure Nick will give a professional opinion but as far as as I know, encryption is the least of your worries. That's good enough, unless your bank etc has seriously fouled up. Even if your passwords are relatively poor, a lot of banks etc will lock you out of your account after 3 attempts.
Malware on your computer or phone can compromise security before data is encrypted. "Social engineering" attacks can be anything from clicking on an apparently harmless link upwards are common.
It's not unknown for organisation's computers to be hacked. This can result in personal data being made all too public. Passwords *should* be secure as any organisation doing a decent job should only store salted hashes of passwords. If they aren't doing this, their IT director should be taken out and publicly flogged, before being hung drawn and quartered.
I've suffered one attempted ID theft event. I didn't lose any money but it was still a nuisance. The attacker probably used information about me that's available in the public domain to attempt to fool security with 3 organisations. Probably done over the phone in each case. trying to impersonate me. They had partial success with Nationwide who handled the matter rather badly but didn't allow any fake transactions. First Direct and Three deflected the attacks successfully.
Thanks Jeffery and also the tales of attempts to scam you.
First Direct uses voice recognition and my wife has a chat with a person too. Sometimes they ask a security question as well.
Gary
In my case the FD voice recognition picked up the scammer immediately. The only mistake they made was to phone me and ask me to go through security. This is wrong, because I cannot be sure who is phoning me. Caller ID can be easily faked. What they should do is ask me to ring them back on a nnumber that is publicly available. Which is what I did. They then put me through enhanced security which fel like an interrogation. When I got through that the person said I had passed immediately on voice ID.
FD are still the best bank for service. I've been with them since a few months after they started as a phone based bank. The fact I'm still with them speaks for itself. Highly recommended. They give better service by net and phone (24/7 human response) than you can get over the counter elsewhere. And they're offering a £150 bonus if you switch to them via the standard current account switching service.
(05-06-2022, 10:24 AM)Radio Fixer Wrote: [ -> ]Been wondering as our BT landline is going ...
We used to use this for Bank transfers and wonder if the Internet and Mobile phones are safe? I sort of presume that secure end to end encryption is being used?
VoIP technology is certainly safer than POTS (normally wired analogue phones) - it is end-to-end encrypted (where the other end is where the VoIP traffic enters the normal trunk system, which ISTR is ISDN-based around 64kB channels).
Tapping into an analogue phone is very very easy; much harder for VoIP.
However, as most attacks are via social engineering, it's better to concentrate on avoiding that.