Bank of Ceylon thinks global to act local

Leads the Sri Lankan Banks’ fight against internet identity theft, phishing, and online financial fraud with international expert VeriSign

In a reflection of thinking global and acting local, Bank of Ceylon, the country’s number one, has deployed the advanced identity protection services from VeriSign Inc. to lead the Sri Lankan banks’ continuing fight against Internet identity theft, phishing, and on-line financial fraud.

“In deploying the VeriSign Identity Protection Services (VIP) to strengthen the authentication of the bank’s Internet banking facility for its customers, Bank of Ceylon has added a key layer of protection to safeguard its customers’ digital identities,” BOC officials said.

VIP Service is a comprehensive suite of identity protection and authentication services that enables both invisible security through VeriSign Identity Protection Fraud Detection Services as well as more visible security through VeriSign Identity Protection Authentication Services. Bank of Ceylon joins the VIP Network that includes leading on-line commerce providers such as eBay, PayPal and Charles Schwab. The bank will be initially extending the security solution to high-usage, high net-worth Internet banking customers, but will eventually be extending the solution to all active Internet banking customers.

The first line of defence against identity theft is strong authentication. The simplest and most common method for authentication is a user name and a password. Unfortunately, end users rarely choose good passwords, or keep their passwords secret. Attackers know this, and often guess a user’s password. Multi-Factor Authentication implemented with VIP Services by Bank of Ceylon is designed to address these problems. It combines a primary factor (something the user knows) with a secondary factor (something that the user has). If an attacker steals only the first factor, he will not be able to forge the second factor and will be unable to authenticate.

The second line of defence against identity theft is fraud detection. Stronger authentication techniques can dramatically reduce fraud, but cannot stop all fraud. If an attacker manages to steal or forge a user’s authentication credentials, VIP Fraud Detection Services prevent him from stealing money or more information from a user’s Internet banking account using a combination of business rules and machine learning algorithms. The VIP Network is a set of shared services that builds on the VIP Fraud Detection Service and VIP Authentication Service. It means that Bank of Ceylon customers can use a single security token to authenticate themselves across any VIP enabled online commerce website including world leading online commerce sites such as eBay and PayPal. As a result, any of the bank’s customers who already have received a security token from such sites also has the great opportunity of using it in the bank’s Internet banking facility. This makes it more convenient for Bank of Ceylon customers to adopt two-factor authentication paving way for a new era in protection of customers’ digital identities.