Your source for the latest technology information of interest to community banks across America.
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter and stay on top of the latest technology trends in Hardware, Software, ATMs, Biometrics, Wireless, Online Banking, Marketing, Security, Internet Access and Call Centers.
According to IDC, about 90% of the world`s data is considered “cold data,” which means it is accessed infrequently after capture which makes it a good candidate to be stored on traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). The remaining 10% of the world`s data is hot, meaning it is captured and accessed frequently which in turn makes it a great candidate for storage on solid state drives (SSDs). Tiered storage architectures, where each class of storage provides unique performance qualities that are best-suited to the data in that tier, feature various tiers:
- CPU cache and in-memory processing from the “hottest” tier, with small amounts of data in flight
- PCIe NVMe SSDs to handle hot data spilled from memory to storage
- MLC Serial ATA (SATA) SSDs for the warm tier
- HDDs for cold data since this offers the lowest cost per gigabyte
Brother's MFC-J985DW printers are designed for small offices - business-capable features include automatic two-sided printing, up to 20 sheet ADF, and wireless and mobile device connectivity. The MFC-J985DW prints a black and white page for less than a penny and color pages for less than a nickel. It comes with a two year limited warranty with free phone support for the life of the product.
~~~
IBM Spectrum Protect, formerly Tivoli Storage Manager, provides advanced data backup and data recovery for virtual, physical, cloud and software defined environments. It delivers file, block and object data protection and integrates with VMware and Hyper-V. It also features incremental forever backups, enterprise management, journal-based backups, policy based, copy storage pools, deduplication and node replication.
CipherPost Pro Secure E-signature is AppRiver`s new secure electronic signature offering which integrates directly into Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office 365 and other web-based email clients. The company says that their solution provides an alternative to costly and inefficient signing and transmission of paper documents with a simple “click-to-acknowledge” way to e-sign documents right in email. The company states that their package delivers real-time activity alerts and timeline insights and provides instant verification. They offer a complimentary, fully functional 30 day trial.
~~~
MasterCard's October 2016 ATM liability shift could mean that somewhere between 10 percent and 40 percent of all U.S. retail ATMs will cease operations. Some observers are estimating that this translates into between 25,000 and 100,000 American ATMs that will be taken out of service. Some are so old that they may just be able to be used for parts before being sent to the scrap yard, while others may find new lives as refurbished EMV-compliant ATMs.
Discovered in 2009, Skimer was the first malicious program to target ATMs, and now a revised version is making a comeback according to Kaspersky Lab. Scammers install the malware either through physical access, or via the FI`s internal network which then allows them to withdraw all the cash in the ATM or pilfer the data from cards used at the ATM, including a user`s account number and PIN. Kaspersky Lab has identified 49 modifications of the Skimer malware, with 37 of these modifications targeting one major ATM manufacturer. To prevent this threat, Kaspersky Lab recommends undertaking regular AV scans, accompanied by the use of whitelisting technologies, a good device management policy, full disk encryption, protecting the ATM`s BIOS with a password, allowing only HDD booting and isolating the ATM network from any other internal bank network.
At the recent Banknote Conference, attendees and vendors were discussing new security concepts. Giesecke & Devrient was one company that was proposing new security schemes based on magnetism or electrical conductivity, as well as features that would only be visible in UV or polarized light. Another anti-counterfeiting technique was a registered security thread dubbed "Registered RollingStar," which allows new effects and designs to be used on security laminating film. Finally, "micromirror" and "ColourShift" technologies may help create new optically variable effects that will deter counterfeiters.
~~~
Beaming technology enables POS (point of sale) laser scanners to read barcodes on mobile devices. This is important because about $5 billion worth of coupons are redeemed at checkout to partially pay for items. Mobeam says that their solution allows smartphones to communicate reliably and securely with the world's laser scanners enabling a true mobile wallet experience with support for barcode gift card, loyalty card & coupon payments. Mobeam technology allows laser scanners to read 1D barcodes from mobile devices, using patented technology that sends pulses of light to the sensor in scanners mimicking the black-and-white sequencing of standard barcodes. Users hold the smartphone screen towards the scanner and it works without a barcode showing on the screen, offering non-reproducible mobile-only offerings.
~~~
IBM is convinced that blockchain technology has the potential to make the financial system more efficient and secure. They are suggesting that the US government replace SSNs with a new blockchain-based system modeled after India's new Aadhaar numbers, which link to biometric and demographic information. Blockchain technology could maintain a detailed audit trail of data, including time stamps and annotations to assure participants of data accuracy, and Big Blue wants the federal government to invest in research to further this technology.
CrowdStrike announced enhanced next-generation antivirus (AV) capabilities to its CrowdStrike Falcon Platform to help customers identify and block ransomware families such as Locky, Cerber and Teerac, among others. The new release also includes introducing an expanded and updated set of APIs for the Falcon Platform, along with CrowdStrike`s new open source tool, CrowdStrike Falcon Orchestrator.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group observed more phishing attacks in the first quarter of 2016 than at any other time in history. There was a 250 percent increase in phishing sites between October 2015 and March 2016, while the total number of unique phishing websites observed in Q1 2016 was a record 289,371. They note that keyloggers that have sophisticated tracking components to target specific information were specifically on the rise in 2016.
~~~
Addressing Insider Threats, Cyber Attacks & Data Security
|
Accellion - http://www.accellion.com
Read Yorgen H. Edholm's comments: https://www.cunews.com/Accellion.pdf |
|
Allied Solutions - http://www.alliedsolutions.net
Read Ann D. Davidson's comments: https://www.banktt.com/Allied.pdf |
|
BrightPoint - http://www.brightpointsecurity.com
Read Ajay Nigam's comments: https://www.banktt.com/BrightPoint.pdf |
|
Cummins Allison - http://www.cumminsallison.com
Read Dean Theodore's comments: https://www.banktt.com/CumminsAllison.pdf |
|
Easy Solutions - http://www.easysol.net
Read Daniel Ingevaldson's comments: https://www.banktt.com/EasySolutions.pdf |
|
EnableSoft - http://www.enablesoft.com
Read Richard Milam's comments: https://www.banktt.com/EnableSoft.pdf |
|
|
|
Info@Risk - http://www.infoatrisk.com
Read David Trepp's comments: https://www.banktt.com/This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. |
|
InfoSight - http://www.infosightinc.com
Read Brian Smith's comments: https://www.banktt.com/InfoSight.pdf |
|
Millennial Vision - http://www.mviusa.com
Read Scott Cowan's comments: https://www.banktt.com/MVi.pdf |
|
Onbase by Hyland Software - http://www.onbase.com
Read Steve Comer's comments: https://www.banktt.com/OnBase.pdf |
|
Pwnie Express - http://www.pwnieexpress.com
Read Paul Paget's comments: https://www.banktt.com/PwnieExpress.pdf |
|
Securonix - http://www.securonix.com
Read Chris Inglis' comments: https://www.banktt.com/Securonix.pdf |
|
SentinelOne - http://www.sentinelone.com
Read Scott Gainey's comments: https://www.banktt.com/SentinelOne.pdf |
|
StrongAuth, Inc. - http://www.strongauth.com
Read Arshad Noor's comments: https://www.banktt.com/StrongAuth.pdf |
|
TruShield - http://www.trushieldinc.com
Read Paul Caiazzo's comments: https://www.banktt.com/TruShield.pdf |
|
Venminder - http://www.venminder.com
Read Aaron Kirkpatrick's comments: https://www.banktt.com/Venminder.pdf |
~~~
Credit card advocates love to use their cards to obtain rewards, plus they like the deferred payment aspect and the fact that they offer a built-in line of defense from fraud. Some of these proponents think that credit card-issuing banks should work harder to reinforce these three advantages, especially to convert debit card users to credit cards. For those customers that are nervous about hefty late fees, a robust alerting system can go a long way towards assuaging the common fears that many customers may have about forgetting to pay their credit card bill on time and incurring hefty fees. The rewards for the bank can be greater interchange revenues when credit card volumes go up, while simultaneously possibly saving on cash handling and ATM processing costs.
~~~
Online Banking/E-Commerce/Website Design
According to Cisco, there are billions of dollars of "Digital Value at Stake" that financial institutions must create a road map for capturing. Digital solutions that they recommend implementing include video-based advisors, workforce transformation, mobile payments, virtual tellers, information-based consulting, white-label services, and connected ads. Some other digital initiatives potentially include omnichannel capabilities, wealth management and asset transfers, mobile banking and mobile payment capabilities, self-service and virtualized delivery models. However they note that security concerns abound around virtually all of these digital initiatives that often cause them to be delayed or not implemented.
Research firm Aite is predicting a major rise, and then subsequent fall, in US counterfeit card fraud through 2020. Specifically, they anticipate that when the EMV migration is completed in 2020 that counterfeit card will drop from a peak of $4.5 billion to approximately $900 million. The report, entitled “EMV: Issuance Trajectory and Impact on Account Takeover and CNP,” also found that account takeover losses for financial institutions -- when a fraudster poses as a genuine customer, gains control of an account and then makes unauthorized transactions -- will increase from $644 million in 2015 to more than $1 billion by 2020 in the U.S.
~~~
Tempered Networks Identity-Defined Network (IDN) solution cloaks and hides your perimeter and transient resources which they say provides baked-in security, micro-segmentation, and resiliency. Their goal is to shift the network trust model from spoofable IP addresses to embedded cryptographic identities. Tempered Networks creates groups of hosts that are allowed to communicate, independently of where or on what LAN the hosts connect, or on how the hosts are interconnected. Hosts can simultaneously be in multiple groups. They call these groups and their trusted communications ‘Identity-Defined Networks` which is an encrypted overlay network that transcends traditional segregation mechanisms, like VLANs, VPNs, MPLS, and addressing schemes, and spans across firewalls, NATs, ISPs, WANs, cellular, etc.
MetTel announced the launch of its enhanced multi-carrier SD-WAN solution that allows organizations with active MPLS networks locked in contracts to access the benefits of SD-WAN through their layer 3 backbone network connections, when normally they would have to wait until end of contract to benefit from this new technology. They claim that their platform increases bandwidth by up to 400%, and includes these benefits as well:
- helps eliminate downtime
- gains faster access to the cloud
- helps improve voice quality
- combines bandwidth such as DSL, Cable and 4G LTE into a single connection
- simplifies branch deployments with cloud-based gateway provisioning based on pre-defined policies
- saves money
~~~
VoicePIN announced its new Software-as-a-Service model for its voice-based authentication technology. The Polish startup calls their solution the first, off-the-shelf, voice biometrics service available for smaller organizations. Their technology helps secure call centers by recording each authorization attempt, comparing it with previously collected information to make it more resistant to spoofing. In action, a voiceprint is made of user`s voice patterns that are stored in the form of mathematical models. Each time a speaker is being authorized, the recording is verified and matched with all previously collected data guidelines. The company says that their software is sophisticated enough to detect whether the sample is an original or a re-played recording, and that it works even if the user has a head cold or sore throat.
~~~