Once again, convenience has cost irreplaceable time and money.
Certain popular mobile devices allow you to create trusted environments, overriding the secure login. This enables leaving your device unlocked for convenience when at home or in your car. Sounds wonderful, right? Bad Actors are cleaning people out, knowing that human beings choose convenience over security. This allows them to take advantage of these situations.
Unlocked for convenience
Choosing this convenience feature grants access to email and messaging services. Someone with the right knowledge can take over your bank account. We know this, as it happened to someone related to one of our own. It also gives them access to a host of other information and the ability to create future fraud that you may not even suspect; such as forwarding your email so they can scrape it for other valuable information.
Knowledgeable attacker
In this case, the phone was left in a locked car while the individual was surfing. Thinking his items were secure in the locked car, he did not remember to turn off the feature, leaving the mobile device unlocked. In this perfect storm of bad fortune, not only was the device accessible, but the individual’s wallet was also in the car. This gave the bad actor all the information needed to reset the pin on the victim’s ATM card and clean out his bank account.
Time and money
The aftermath of this situation then required hours to repair, not only from the individual, but from the bank as well, costing money and time to everyone involved. This begs the question – how do we create a balance between convenience and securing access to our private information and financial resources? A locked down access to the individual’s email and messaging services would have likely prevented the recovery of the ATM pin, stopping the attack.
Solutions
TraitWare’s mobile app technology and authentication process can lock down critical services. Leveraging our proprietary technology, TraitWare® can provide a secure and easy way to log into applications and resources. The user can log in directly on a mobile device as well as into a PC. Using biometrics or proprietary knowledge factors, TraitWare’s app is simple to open while achieving high levels of security standards (NIST AAL2) .