Banks and online financial transactions and services remain vulnerable to cybercrime, despite progress in closing gaps in security, says cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab Fraud Prevention Safe Money business development head Ross Hogan.

Only 50% of banks have introduced specialised, real-time antifraud solutions, despite a significant rise in customers making online financial transactions and online financial fraud, according to the IT Security Risks Survey 2015 of 5 500 industry representatives from 26 countries, including representatives of 131 banks.

However, 22% of banks believe that real-time antifraud systems are the most effective form of protection available.

Two-thirds (65%) of banks say that customers are increasingly using different devices to make online payments, yet only 53% have implemented two-factor authentication. Fewer than half (42%) of the banks extend a solution to customer devices and only 67% implement a secure connection for all online payments.

“Many banks and payment companies are struggling to fully protect themselves and their customers from financial fraud at a time when customers are using an ever-wider range of devices to conduct a growing number of financial transactions online.

“About 33% of financial services organisations do not offer customers a secure channel for all their online payments and 38% of organisations admit that it is increasingly difficult to tell whether a transaction is fraudulent or genuine, with 33% adopting a ‘we will deal with it as it happens’ approach to fraud protection,” says Hogan.

Further, 29% of banks say it is cheaper to deal with online financial fraud incidents as they arise rather than to try to prevent them from happening.

Considering that Kaspersky Lab’s research uncovered 22.9-million financial malware attacks in 2014, targeting 2.7-million customers worldwide, it is clear that dealing with each incident individually is not a viable, long-term option. “Customers deserve better and so do the financial services organisations,” says Hogan.

The study found that general Internet-security software solutions are not widely regarded as an effective method for preventing the increasingly well-disguised phishing and malware attacks that can lead to financial fraud. Fewer than 10% of respondents favoured this option.

The preferred option is a specialist solution, which includes multi-layered protection for online and mobile banking and a layer analysing banking operations on customers’ devices. Developing applications for end points – computers or mobile devices – that check the authenticity of websites and protects against the theft or modification of information entered on the devices is also important to enable users to protect their financial information and devices.

The Kaspersky Fraud Prevention Software Development Kit enables banks to create applications that are secure against online fraud for Android, iOS and Windows Mobile platforms. Kaspersky Fraud Prevention also has a comprehensive security solution designed to counter online banking fraud, concludes Hogan.