Trust and Risk Online

In a recently released paper by the Brookings Institute, they address the issue of trust in an increasingly on-line business environment.  They focus on the difficulty of establishing, maintaining and verifying identity on-line, and how the trust relationship between on-line services and consumers is being threatened by weaknesses in this identity layer component.

Although the paper is not specifically geared for the banking industry, it does contain several items of interest to bankers.  Discussion of on-line identity attacks is relevant to the emerging interest in social media.  Social engineering is also a topic of interest to banks, and has been for some time.  There is also a mention of the Red Flags model, and how compliance with the regulation (which started 12/31/2010) requires a strong identity authentication component.  They do note that the existing FFIEC authentication guidance is a good model, but they recognize that the Red Flags, and other financial institution guidance, falls short because:

“…three of the top five targets for phishing attacks in 2010 (eBay, Facebook, and Google) are not financial services web sites (Gudkova, 2010), and are thus are not necessarily covered by extant rules. Many other online services, including webmail sites, web hosting sites and social network sites are frequent targets. Clearly they are attractive targets for malicious actors seeking identity information, even if those identities are not actually the paying customers of those firms. Access to credentials of these sites can expose highly sensitive information and serve as the jumping off point to serious and highly customized fraud attempts.”

In the end, financial institution risk managers must carefully consider the risks of this “identity layer” in the current environment, and weigh them against the potential benefits of social media.  The paper is definitely worth a read…highly recommended.

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