A. Flaws in banking websites
According to a recent study by University of Michigan ,in an examination of 214 bank Websites ,more than 75 percent of bank websites have at least one design flaw that could lead to the theft of customer information and flaws are ones that even an expert user would find difficult to detect and unlike bugs, cannot be fixed with a patch. It was recommended to use SSL throughout the entire website and to avoid using links to third-party sites[15].Secure banking websites have become an integral part of our day-to-day life from our personal to our job-related business . A survey conducted by Pew Internet states 42% of all internet users bank online. With 24/7 access from around the world users can view balances, transfer funds and lots more at their convenience using online banking. Due to the sensitive nature of these sites, security is a top priority. Hackers are increasingly launching targeted attacks against weak websites, as opposed to automated attacks against tens of thousands of sites at once .According to whiteHat Report 2011 the Cross-site scripting was the most prevalent threat, accounting for 55 percent of serious vulnerabilities. Cross-site scripting is when an attacker injects into a web page malicious scripts that can bypass a browser's security mechanism to gain access to a visiting user's computer.
Information leakage was the second most prevalent vulnerability. The flaw was found in 53 percent of the sites, down from 64 percent in 2010, when the vulnerability was number one. In general, WhiteHat found that Web application firewalls would have helped mitigate slightly more than 70 percent of custom Web application vulnerabilities. SQL injection vulnerabilities, a favorite hacker target, was the eighth most prevalent flaw. Fully 5 percent of sites had at least one such vulnerability that could be exploited without logging into the site.SQL injection is a popular way to attack databases through a website. SQL statements are entered into a field on a web form in an attempt to get the website to pass the command to the database. A typical request is for the database to deliver its content to the attacker. One such example is HDFC bank website https://leads.hdfcbank.com leaks information about individual Customers. This can be done by changing the Customer Id when opening up a Recurring Deposit Account[14]. It was seen on 4 feb,2010 and fixed on 17 feb,2010.The SQL vulnerability on HDFC Bank‟s website was discovered on 15-July-2011 and was reported on 17-July-2011.But even after conducting the vulnerability assessment from a third party they were not able to discover this critical flaw that existed in their web portal since a long time, until complete inputs about the vulnerability is sent to their security team.[14] According to a study released earlier this year by WhiteHat Security, the top banking Web site vulnerability in 2010 was information leakage. The term was used as a catch-all description of a vulnerability in which a Web site reveals sensitive data such as technical details of the Web application, environment or user-specific data.[13] WhiteHat revealed that common causes of this vulnerability were site operators' failure to "scrub out" HTML or script comments containing sensitive information, such as database passwords and improper application or server configurations. In its WhiteHat Security Website Statistics Report, released on Wednesday 6/29/2012, the company found that the average Website had 79 serious vulnerabilities in 2011, compared with 230 in 2010 but Banking Websites possessed the fewest number of serious vulnerabilities (17) of any industry.
Many banking websites Present Secure Login Options on Insecure Pages which leave users vulnerable to manin-the-middle attacks. Users don‟t have any way of knowing if their usernames and passwords are being sent to a hacker site. This makes it impossible for a user to make the correct decision. Some banking Sites forwarded users to new pages that had different domains without notifying the user from a secure page. Generally, if a knowledgeable user visits a secure website of bank, he or she will look for the bank‟s name in the URL, prefixed by https. Several financial institution websites start with https, but for some transactions, they redirect the customer to a site with different domain and even the signed certificate also bears a different company name. Now it is up to the user to determine if the new site is really affiliated with the financial institution or it happens to be a window that popped up as a result of some other event, or even an attack[2]. Contact Information/Security Advice on Insecure Pages that can be changed by hackers and can be used for their benefit because users rely on that information. So not only the data channel must be secured, but also the context that is used to generate the session keys for the channel must be secured and that security-relevant context is contact information or security advice because users rely on that Information. operations. And it has been also noted that some of the banking sites don‟t provide contact details where user should report in case of any security breech or suspected fraud. According to DSCI-KPMG Survey-2010 only 63% of Indian bank sites provide contact details on sites to report any breach-63% [10].
Security-Sensitive Information like social security numbers or passwords or account statements provided through email that is insecure channel of communication. Some banks send passwords or user IDs through email if user request that information incase user forget it and most of banks provide account statements monthly through email. But if mail server is insecure, an attacker could be view unencrypted traffic on the network and obtain the sensitive information and accounts of users can be compromised. Some banking sites has IP addresses that match with other lot of ugly sites that can result in easy hacking. And example of it is Jammu and Kashmir Bank‟s website. A reverse IP check shows this jkbank.net has the IP address: 68.178.156.75 and 53 sites found with the IP 68.178.156.75,a shared host with 53 ugly sites[5].
ICICI bank recently done mistake that the content of the CAPTCHA image was being sent in the Response Header.
This happened on the form where you enter your credit card details. It definitely made no sense having the
CAPTCHA.[5]