Recently there have been two financial accidents in Korea. The first is the incident where the internal server of Hyundai Capital, a financial service company, was breached by a group of hackers and the customer database was stolen. The second incident happened at the NH(NongHyup) Bank where someone ill-intentionally deleted its financial information from the server. The two incidents are under investigation, but people are worried that their personal information are exposed to hackers.
These accidents tell us how financial companies are weak in their security of DB management. This security issue is not the problem of a sole company but a common vulnerability around our internet and mobile financial services. Though we know the danger of a malware or spyware, most customers and companies have excessively believed in the system integrity of financial services.
But the reality is totally different with the belief. Furthermore, the number of customers using a mobile banking service or a stock service is rapidly increasing. It has a potential to spread out spyware to a personal user’s smartphone and to use it as a zombie phone. Several malwares intentionally increase data-traffic by connecting to an advertisement. Especially Android OS opens its source codes public, it is vulnerable to the attacks by hackers or other spy-wares pretending to be a game or another useful application.
To prevent these security problems, carriers are distributing an application which can remotely control a cellular phone. But this is just a follow-up method. While there are several anti-virus programs in a personal computer, a mobile anti-virus application is at its early stage. But due to the rapid distribution of smartphones and the sharp growth of a mobile application market, the market of a mobile security gets more important and several applications are provided to a customer. The main players of the market are Kaspersky, McAfee, Lookout and Symantec.
And if a mobile wallet is activated based on widespread NFC-embedded smartphones, it would be a very important service which are related with financial information in USIM. Now most security applications provide similar functions as follows:
– Locking up a phone
– Saving DB
– Monitoring a spyware/malware
– Determining a location of a phone when a user get lost one
Among the listed functions, data back-up is not a recommended function but it will be very useful in a case where it is connected to a personal safe box service. And it will be preferable for users to install an application. But many users think anti-virus applications are a unnecessary thing in a way that those programs decrease the performance of a smartphone and use battery by regular check-out. Even some users delete an anti-virus application to speed-up their smartphone.
Security is necessary but it has a long way to achieve its goal.