Within the past decades, online banking or for some, internet banking, has experienced a tremendous use. It involves the use of an internet service to transact bank business. This has been criticized by some set of people as a result of insecurity concerns which bedevils this system of banking. As a result of the insecurity, people in online banking have had to face the ugly incidents of their bank accounts being tampered with by internet fraudsters. With such unfavorable experience, it has deterred some people into going into online banking.

However, the banking institutions, whose business venture is being badly painted by these men of the underworld, has with the growing technological advancements tried to counter the efforts of these fraudsters. To a very large extent, their effort has been met with an enormous success as people can today enjoy their online banking activity without complaints. Thanks indeed must be given to the impregnable strategies which these financial bodies have set up in place to combat the menace of online banking insecurity issues.

Online banking security has been strengthened in the modern times with the help of advancements in electronic and electrical engineering. Basically, there exist two main measures used in online banking security. The first is the PIN/TAN system, where the PIN stands for a password, used for login, and TANs represents one-time passwords to authenticate transactions. The second way is the signature based online banking where all transactions are signed and encrypted digitally. In this wise, banks secure their online transactions by the use of 128 bit encrypted secure sockets layer (SSL) for all connections, which helps in encoding information passing between an online user and a web server.

Besides the above, there are security measures which banks adopt, which they enjoin their customers to observe with the greatest diligence, in order to ensure secure transactions. Such measures include the use of a complex word as passwords, more preferably alphanumeric words. Having a password in addition to the profile and PIN number, and locking a client out after three incorrect trials to sign in. Some banks also allow their client to choose the PIN by themselves, so as to make for more personal knowledge of the PIN number. They also choose the client identification in a random mode. Again, some financial institutions in online banking adopt the method of signing out the client after eight minutes of leaving their system unattended. This is to prevent unauthorized access to the system. Most banking institutions also adopt what is known as encryption, which is the converting of a meaningful message or other information into something meaningless to those without the authority to view it. This process also allows an authorized person to view such through the process of decryption, which coverts the message back into its original form.

The above measures have contributed hugely to saving the face of online banking. But, it still calls for concerted effort from both the banking institutions and the clients to contribute to the success of secure online banking by playing their roles with care.