Majority of online banking sites insecure by design

That is the surprising conclusion of a University of Michigan study which discovered that more than 75 percent of bank sites surveyed had at least one flaw which could make customers vulnerable to financial or identity loss. The findings, which will be presented today at a Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security meeting at the Carnegie Mellon University, suggest that these are design flaws that cannot be fixed with a simple patch...

Professor Atul Prakash from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, along with doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders, looked at a total of 214 online financial institutions while undertaking the study. None expected to find that such a large number of them would be vulnerable to potential data and identity theft.