Online Business Banking Security

Businesses carry a huge security risk while doing online banking. The protections available for consumer banking are not available to businesses. So, if for instance, a hacker or malware gets into your business account and transfers funds, it is unlikely that you will be able to recover your lost money.

Small businesses are soft targets for hackers, because they do not have all the security mechanisms that large enterprises have in place while still holding substantial amounts of cash in business banking accounts.

What can a business do to secure online banking?

  • Carry out online banking on a computer on which you do nothing else. Do not browse any other site, other than your bank’s website.

  • If you cannot dedicate a computer to this task, you have two choices:
    • Boot up a computer from a CD ROM that contains an operating system
    • Use a virtual machine. The virtual machine provides less security because the host operating system can be infected, and can be used to steal your banking information.

  • Check your bank accounts regularly, at the end of each work day.

  • If the bank allows you to restrict access to your account by IP address, enable the feature.

  • If the bank allows dual control enable it. If dual control is enabled, a transaction will go through only when it is authorized by two different persons, This makes the task harder for hackers for they now need to get access to two different accounts before they can transfer money.

  • Enable alerts for transactions. This way you will be notified whenever a transaction takes place and may be warned in sufficient time to prevent future fraudulent transactions, and hopefully be able to reverse the fraudulent transaction.

  • Install an outgoing firewall on your network that prevents malware from stealing .Our Productivity, Security and Control (PSeC) Appliance contains such a firewall.

  • If you can get a cyber security insurance policy get it.