Just had a business customer tell me one of their banks froze their accounts, and when they called in they were told it was because the bank detected a virus on their computer.
Since when can banks access your machine like this? Or has this been a thing for a while and I’m just fud?
Going to invistigate further; just wondering about this whole “banks scanning computers for viruses” thing…
Banks can’t access the computer no, unless they provide some kind of financing program which seems unlikely.
I think what happened here is the bank detected abnormal traffic and/or behaviour coming from the client on their end and just explained it with layman terms.
What @Baz said. I know some ISP’s like to monitor traffic for anything suspicious and basically kick you off if they think your machine is doing odd stuff. Happened often at my old workplace, but thats because we dealt with clients virus ridden crusty ketchup stained laptops. Its possible the ISP tips off major banks to this sort of stuff.
Banks themselves actually track fuckloads of stuff on their sites. They record things like IP’s, location data(if enabled), how often you login from certain areas, what devices you use to login, etc. All this gets even more extreme if you use the mobile app. Contacts can be used, precise GPS data, IMEI, phone #, and much more. I believe on mobile apps they have permission to snap a pic of you when you open the app, dont quote me on this one though, i read this somewhere a while ago and cant find the source anymore. the data is used for fraud investigations and probably to data mining as well.
That unusual traffic was probably many login requests being automatically sent or some sort of port scan or bruteforcing or fuzzing maybe. Client probably went to the wrong porn sites, got botnet’d hard and now is being used to try and pull another equifax.
My phone blocks and alerts camera access every time I open my banking app, so yeeeaaahhh…
I guess my tinfoil hat alarms triggered hard on this one. Probably just too many prons on the office computer…
I heard of such a thing. the bank can’t, of course, know what’s inside of your computer, however they most likely noticed some abnormal activity and therefore they have frozen the account as they, most likely, assumed that it best for client’s protection. i had such a situation when using an online pharmacy without searching for https://onlinepharmacyreviews.org. there are sites full of scam out there.
but i would really like to find out more how did they found out? abnormal traffic or too many requests or what?..
I just blocked it outright via Xprivacy, including anything other than internet and clipboard. THis applies to most of my apps really. No need for them to access things that arent vital to their operation.
Thats exactly what it is. Either that or “free hd movies game of thrones” sites. If theyre detecting unusual activity then either that machine is trying some shady shit in the background or someone got parts of his card info and are trying to get in from places the banks never seen the client at.
Either too many access attempts from new locations (with incorrect passwords) or the clients machine might be sending other requests alongside typical http stuff i.e. some background botnet trying to bruteforce ssh or something