Malware authors and scammers won't attack the crypto.
Under the headline "no zero-day necessary", Xiphos has published a rather scary blog post on the state of SSL security within the UK's finance industry. It concludes that more than 50% of UK-owned retail banks have weak SSL implementations on their online banking sites, with 14% of them getting the lowest grade on Qualys's SSLLabs service.
This isn't good. Banking is largely based on trust, and getting IT security right should play an important role in being trusted. But we should be careful not to confuse sub-optimal security with a likelihood of this leading to actual attacks.
Of the vulnerabilities Xiphos mentions, CRIME and POODLE are the most serious. They make it easy for an attacker with a man-in-the-middle position to steal secure session cookies, thus allowing them to hijack a browsing session. This simply should not be possible on a site where people manage their finances.
However, cybercriminals rarely use man-in-the-middle attacks. For them, the fact that they often don't scale well and can't be performed remotely, makes such attacks rather uninteresting. Moreover, most banks mitigate session-hijacking attacks by requiring the user to authenticate transactions through a second channel. Hence it isn't surprising that there have been no known instances of CRIME or POODLE having been used in the wild.
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