This month’s edition of Did You Know is timely,
as we just saw via a story on WSB-TV news this past weekend that we
all can relate to. You can watch the WSB-TV News video here.
As the story goes, a lady had her Chase bank account emptied by cyber thieves,
after she logged into her mobile payment app (Zelle) using a
local hotel’s internet. The crooks used “sniffing” tools to grab her
credentials to login minutes later, swiping $1,800 from her account.
Worst of all, the bank refused to refund her money because the transaction was
“legitimate”. Chase later did replace the stolen funds, after she
told them she’d reported the incident to the media.
Clark Howard weighed in on the story with a recommendation to set up a seperate
“payment account” with limited funds in it and link that
to these type apps reduce your liability. That’s a good
suggestion, but it doesn’t eliminate the problem.
This story jumped out at us because it’s a perfect example of what we want to do for our
clients: we don’t want to
fix problems, we want to ELIMINATE them!In this case, the
answer to the problem is MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication).
With MFA you can print your login credentials on your biz cards, your website
and the front of the shirt you are wearing and nobody can get into your account
but YOU! It’s really very simple, yet so few take advantage and make the effort
to implement it.
In this case, unfortunately, Chase doesn’t really offer true MFA protection,
but they should. Hopefully, this type of news exposure may cause them to do
something more.
The good news is, for most of you reading this, MFA is something you CAN set up
as a protection. If you want to learn more about how MFA can help to safeguard
your business, just let us know.
In the meantime, be careful using unprotected or public internet access to
do anything that can leave you open to cyber attacks. There are bad actors just
waiting to pounce, so stay safe out there!
