Some big financial institutions in Australia have been accused of telling 'porky pies' by claiming their company networks are secure for credit card transactions using the Internet, WAP and telephone lines.
"Nobody is safe in Australia. The big spiel about credit cards being safe to use [on the Internet] is a blatant lie," Anderson Corporation National Business Development Manager, Colin Jeffrey said.
"Everyone knows it is, even the financial institutions - but they're still peddling it," he told ZDNet.
The failure of most institutions in Australia to effectively secure their networks has led to moratoriums being enforced to provide better security for customers using credit cards for Internet, WAP and telephone transactions.
According to Jeffrey, the larger financial institutions based in the United States discovered that their subsidiaries in Australia did not have secure networks for transactions, which is the reason why moratoriums were put in place.
"The subsidiaries in Australia are running financial transactions in the clear - there is very little or no security whatsoever," Jeffrey claimed.
"In the past year there was a "few" AU$100 million that went missing from financial institutions in Australia, in particular from credit card fraud."
The financial institutions under assessment could not be named, however Jeffrey told ZDNet that the "institutions know who they are."
From assessments on network security carried out by Anderson Corporation, Jeffrey said many corporations believe a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption by Microsoft and Netscape to be enough security.
"But it simply is not," he said.
Furthermore, organisations in Australia are using Transportable Socket Layer (TSL) for securing WAP applications, which he says provides less protection on transactions than SSL.
