Corporate Banking
Strong Authentication with VASCO

Overview:

For financial institutions conducting transactions over electronic channels, the most prevalent vulnerability is also the most obvious one: the use of static passwords as a form of user authentication. Outdated and weak, static passwords are ineffective against today’s security threats. To rely on static passwords as a means of authentication in the financial world is an open invitation for fraudulent attacks, compromised accounts and financial losses.

As the global leader in two-factor authentication solutions for the financial industry, VASCO offers mature technologies designed to complement existing security policies and minimally impact the existing IT architecture. VASCO solutions have been refined by years of experience in some of the world’s largest deployments, most commonly to secure high-risk areas such as:

• ACH and wire transfers
• Cash management
• FX
• Proprietary applications
• Mobile applications

Goal:

VASCO’s Strong Authentication solutions provide financial organizations with strong, viable security solutions that can be seamlessly and effortlessly implemented into existing security systems, so financial organizations can stay focused on what they do best: providing banking and financial services—securely.

VASCO solutions perform a range of functions:

• One-time passwords
• Challenge and response
• Electronic signatures and transaction validation
• Host authentication

Threats:

When sensitive information is not properly secured, fraudsters have a variety of techniques in their arsenal in order to steal it. Among the most prevalent are pharming, phishing, Trojan horses, viruses and man-in-the-middle attacks combined with malicious code. Almost all of the attacks are aimed at baiting victims into visiting spoofed websites or downloading malicious software. The attackers can then steal confidential credentials (such as username and password) and use this information to take over bank accounts and conduct fraudulent transactions.

Approach:

Based on the financial institution’s existing architecture, VASCO’s back-end platform is integrated into one or more customer-facing applications. VASCO has existing partnerships with a broad range of vendors in the portal, single sign-on and banking applications markets.