ING Direct solves Internet banking riddle
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As more and more people turn to the  Internet to pay bills and shop for goods and services, Dutch  financial services group ING has carved out a lead in what was  once considered the most elusive of online services: banking.
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(InfoWorld) - Banking and insurance conglomerate ING Group has finalized contracts worth â¬750 millionÂ ($994 million) with a consortium of companies to provide workspace services for its 53,000 employees in Europe. The contracts with Royal KPN, Getronics, Atos Origin, and AccentureÂ are each for seven years and cover the installation, maintenance, and support of desktop PCs, laptops, printers and telephones, the companies said Thursday. It's the biggest of three outsourcing deals that ING has finalized recently, worth a combined total of â¬1.3 billion. They are part of a cost-cutting plan announced last November that is designed to save the company â¬460 million per year, including â¬230 million from operations and IT. ABN AMRO Bank made a similar moveÂ last year, announcing a plan to outsource its IT operations worldwide in a series of deals worth â¬1.8 billion over five years. The bulk of that contract went to IBM. KPN took the biggest slice of the latest ING contract. It was awarded â¬269 million to provide fixed and mobile communications, call center, LAN (local area networking) and conferencing services for staff in the Netherlands and Belgium. Atos Origin was awarded â¬216 million to design and manage ING's back-end office automation, including e-mail and the active directory, and provide related support for end users. Getronics was awarded â¬213 million for help desk and on-site support for end users, as well as hardware purchasing and asset management. Accenture was awarded â¬52 million to be the "integrator," coordinating services and managing the supplier contracts. When ING announced an initial agreement with the four companies in July it said the contracts would run for five years and be worth about â¬800 million. It estimated that 550 full-time employees would be transferred to the contractors. That number will now be 430, it said Thursday. Of the earlier outsourcing contracts, on Nov. 6 ING finalized a six-year, â¬200 million deal with LogicaCMG for application management, IT maintenance and testing. And on Dec. 6 it signed a seven-year, â¬350 million contract with the U.K.'s Astron to process its banking and insurance documents.
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Feeding on fat cats A researcher has uncovered malware that targets commercial bank customers by logging into their online accounts and wiring large sums to accounts under the control of criminals.â¦
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Arkadi Kuhlmann, chief executive of ING Direct USA, says the bank tries to encourage customers to save by not offering credit cards.
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DENVER - Federal regulators shut down a phony Internet bank claiming to be located in the tiny Colorado town of Bedrock - population 10 - near the Utah state line.    Through its Web site, the First National Bank of Bedrock offered deposit accounts, investments, debit cards and credit cards, according to the federal Office of the Comptroller of the Currency...
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A major provider of credit card authorizations for Internet retailers was struggling to remain online yesterday. Authorize.net, of Bellevue, Wash., purchased this year by Lightbridge Inc. of Burlington, has been subjected since last week to ''denial of service&quot; attacks, in which vandals try to knock computers out of commission by overwhelming them with data. ''We are working diligently to minimize ...
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An Internet browser feature meant to permit Web addresses in Chinese, Arabic and other languages could encourage online fraudsters by making scam Web sites look legitimate to visitors.
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LONDON, November 22  - Dutch banking and insurance company, ING Group (INN.ETR), has agreed to sell its Baring Asset Management division in two separate deals, for collective net gains of about â¬250 million.
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Why settle for just emptying an online bank account? Scammers conned both a mortgage firm and a bank to hit an IT director for Â£60,000. UK police are hunting the gang responsible for the scam, and at least nine others like it, that are estimated to have netted ID fraudsters hundreds of thousands of pounds, The Times reports.â¦
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By Joe Estrella, The Idaho Statesman, Boise  Jun. 20--Brenda Proctor didn't know the first thing about computers back in 1991 when her employer, Key Bank, asked her to head the team that would install the bank's first Local Area Network so that its computers could talk to each other.
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The FBI has a request for all Internet surfers and potential crime solvers: Please go to http://www.bankbandits.org .
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The Banker-AJ trojan has been coded to lie dormant in the background on infected Windows PCs. When users visit legitimate online banking Web sites of certain UK banks, the malicious code is
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They greet customers with Starbucks coffee, obsess over the exact placement of their teller counters, and monitor customers' reactions to their every move. As banks become more customer focused, they are increasingly looking to retailers for ideas of how to build a better bank branch. After years of ignoring branches during the dot-com boom, banks now are giving them more ...
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More than three million customers of global banking giant HSBC have been left vulnerable while banking over the internet for more than two years because of a security flaw, a newspaper reported.
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Arkadi Kuhlmann, chief executive of ING Direct USA, says it tries to encourage customers to save by not offering credit cards.
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Northern Rock customers have complained of problems accessing their online accounts.
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(InfoWorld) - Users of online banking sites tend to bypass critical clues that the integrity of those sites may have been compromised, according to the working draft of a study released on Sunday by researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study, which will be formally released in May at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, underscores how new technologies and warnings can't completely protect Internet users fromÂ scams such as phishing. It also throws doubt on the effectiveness of site-authentication images, which have been implemented by financial institutions such as Bank of America, Vanguard Group, and ING Bank. The images, selected by the customers, are shown when a bank customer logs in from a different computer than is normally used. The study involved 67 users, with more than 90 percent under 30 years old. Because of varying parameters in the study, not all qualified to be included in the results for each of the three tests. Users were ask to conduct common online banking tasks, although precautions were taken to ensure users weren't put at risk. For the first test, HTTPS indicators -- which show that an encrypted connection is enabled -- were removed from the address bar along with the lock that appears in the bottom right corner of Internet Explorer 6. Although the absence of HTTPS indicators should be a warning, all 67 participants continued with their transactions, the study found. The researchers then conducted a test where the site-authentication image was removed along with the HTTPS indicators. The researchers wrote it is the first empirical investigation into site-authentication images. Only two of 60 people chose not to log in when the image was removed, a key sign that a site may have been tampered with or is a phishing site, the study said. Of users who were actually using their own bank account for the study, 23 of 25 continued to enter their passwords. "We find them [site-authentication images] to be ineffective," the study concludes. In the last test, researchers made it more obvious, this time replacing a password-entry page with a warning page from Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3. The page advises of a problem with the security certificate of the chosen Web site. Despite the warning, 30 of 57 users entered their passwords. The study comes as U.S. banks are beefing up their authentication technologies amid new requirements from federal regulators. In October 2005, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) mandated that U.S. banks implement stronger authentication protections by the end of last year, particularly for high-risk transactions such as sending money to a different person's account. Bank of America uses site-authentication image technology called SiteKey. Users pick an image and assign a phrase to it while also setting three "challenge" questions. If a user logs in from a computer that doesn't already have a cookie, they're asked one of the challenge questions and then to verify the image and phrase. If the image doesn't appear or the phrase is wrong, consumers shouldn't proceed. Bank of America said the image system benefits users since it's free and doesn't involve extra hardware or software.