UK online bankers are more security conscious than those in the US, Germany and Russia, according to new research from Eset.
The security vendor polled at least 1,000 “demographically representative” internet users from each country in the third quarter to find out attitudes to online banking.
It found that 77% of UK users have security software installed on the machine they use for logging into their bank account. This was more than those in the US (74%), Germany (69%) and Russia (65%).
In fact, around 17% of Germans don’t even use any security software, compared to 14% of Russians, around the same of Americans, and 11% of Brits.
More worrying, over a fifth of Russian online bankers didn’t even know if they had security software installed or not—way more than in Germany (14%), the US (12.5%) and the UK (11.5%).
Eset also discovered a difference in the way respondents from different countries used online banking.
Germans and Russians claimed to use it most often to pay their online bills, whereas those in the US and UK focused most on checking their statements. On the other hand, “personal financial management” was the least favored option by all respondents.
Russians were the most likely overall to use online banking with Germans the least likely of the four nations, the report found.
It will be somewhat concerning for financial service providers that a significant proportion of their customers are still failing to adequately secure their online banking sessions.
Virulent new banking Trojans are being developed by the malware writing community all the time—such as the Zeus variant dubbed ‘Sphinx’, which was discovered by IBM X-Force in October.
This type of malware is typically traded with impunity on the underground cybercrime sites of the darknet. The UK (50%) and US (38%) are the two countries most heavily targeted by Sphinx—although there are many more circulating in the wild.
A RiskIQ report from January revealed that more than 40,000 of the apps that reference "banking" in the world’s top 90 app stores contain malware or suspicious binaries. And around half of those contained trojan malware.
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