Like Swiss Emmental cheese, the ways your online banking accounts are protected might be full of holes. Banks have been trying to prevent crooks from accessing your online accounts for ages. Passwords, PINs, coordinate cards, TANs, session tokens – all of these were created to help prevent banking fraud. We recently come across a criminal operation that aims to defeat one of these tools: session tokens. Here’s how they pull it off.
This criminal gang intents to target banks that use session tokens sent through SMS (i.e., text messaging). This is a two-factor authentication method that utilizes users’ phones as a secondary channel. Trying to log into the banking site should prompt the bank to send users an SMS with a number. Users need to enter that number along with their regular username and password in order to transact with the bank. By default, this is used by some banks in Austria, Sweden, Switzerland, and other European countries.