DIGITAL BANKING Tips - Tip 7: Mobile Security - What happens if mobile banking user's phone hacked?

Criminals always go where people go - this is the first thing we have learned in the 1st day Criminology class (sure together with many other interesting stuff, please note that there was no Discovery Channel's Crime documentaries available back in 1996!). Criminal mindset is quite simple and follows where money goes. When it was asked "why do you rob the banks?" to one of the most charming and intelligent bank robbers, Willie Sutton (who had 40 years of interesting criminal career), he answered "because that's where the money is". Yes, that's that simple... 

As of today we know that the future of banking would be mobile - so we can safely estimate that mobile will be the target for hackers. If you have a look to the security trends, you can easily see that the variations and type of attacks have a very strong direction to mobile platforms. The most heartbreaking fact is the ability of mobile apps (lets call them malwares) are much better than the legitimate banking apps (shame on us!). In other words, they know more about our clients then us. The unfortunate result is, if you heavily rely on client profiling in you security perimeter - criminal activity would be very hard to detect. 

This is the short version of the post. 

Starting from Tip 2 to Tip 30 only short versions of my posts are available at Finextra. From Tip 31, full (long) versions of my posts can be read here.