by Kenny Chee

FINANCIAL institutions here could do more to prevent online fraud, going by results from a recent study.

Many of them do not send e-mail that is authenticated - bearing electronic signatures verifying that the senders are from their institutions.

Click to enlarge image. Source: Online Trust Alliance

In the study done by non-profit research organisation Online Trust Alliance, only 29 per cent of the most-visited financial services-industry websites here have such e-mail authentication in place.

This is lower than the 43 per cent among the most-visited North American bank websites.

This means financial institutions in Singapore could be more vulnerable to cybercriminals masquerading as someone from their organisation to send fraudulent e-mail that tries to steal or "phish" for consumers' personal information.

Mr Craig Spiezle, executive director of the Online Trust Alliance, said that security for financial institutions is important because online banking has become very pervasive, and hence one of the largest areas for cybercriminals to exploit.

The study looked at 250 million e-mail messages in six countries including Singapore, and the 100 most-visited websites in each of these countries.

It also showed that none of the most-visited financial-service websites here had an enhanced security certification feature allowing visitors to know if the site they are at is run by a legitimate company.

Despite the findings, marketing executive Sylvia Ng thinks that online banking here is "rather safe" because there are two levels of security before she can access her bank account online.

The 24-year-old has to enter a password on the site, and then a unique one provided by the bank. One company keen to explore having the enhanced security feature for its websites in future is telco SingTel. Its spokesman said that it already has a standard certification procedure for its online billing and transactional websites.

She added: "To prevent unauthorised registration on behalf of customers, we have implemented two-factor authentication for some of our services.

"This ensures a greater degree of security for customers."

It can cost US$1,000 (S$1,400) to get the enhanced security feature, which is not a big expense for most firms, Mr Spiezle said.

kennyc@sph.com.sg

- ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JAKE CHNG

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