Online Banking Grows, But Security Concerns Continue to Accrue

Customers of HSBC, Bank of America and Washington Mutual may want to think twice about banking online. Quickly. The three banks are identified in a study by a UC Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law researcher as the most victimized by identity theft.

CNet, which links to the study, says that researcher Chris Hoofnagle used numbers received under a Freedom of Information Act request. He ran the numbers from three randomly chosen months in 2006. The results were that HSBC had 21 incidents per billion of dollars on deposit, BoA had 17 and WaMu 16. ING was the most secure, with a lone incident per billion on deposit, the study said.

The story says that the findings dovetail with a 2007 report from Cambridge University that said BoA and WaMu phishing sites usually stayed afloat for more than 100 hours, while Chase and PayPal general got such sites taken down in less than two days.