STANDARD BANK is considering a number of new technologies in its drive to protect itself and clients from increasingly sophisticated online fraud and theft.

Speaking at the ITWeb Security Summit, Pat Pather, director for group IT , said that the bank was looking at, among other things, matrix cards, tokens and integrated token cards, a risk-based authentication model for self-service channels, voice biometrics for call centre and telephone banking, and fingerprint and palm-vein biometrics in the branch network with extension to ATMs.

Pather says that e-criminals are becoming more sophisticated. As a result, the next generation of attacks will see greater focus on finding application vulnerabilities.

"Application security is very important. Hackers are going to start hacking into your system. The very simple reason is, as we tighten up our controls, meaning we have two-factor authentication in place and so forth, what are people going to do?"

He says time between discovery and exploit is shrinking to the point of zero-day attacks. He also expects to see complex social engineering techniques and the emergence of "smishing" (gathering sensitive information via cellphones) and "vishing" (voice).

Tags: Security  Summit