News

We are glad to welcome our long-term employee, Mr. Michael Schober to the Management Board. Mr. Schober has been an integral part of our team from the start of NOVOSEC AG and he was substantially involved in building up the project work sector.

Starting today, Postbank offers its customers a new se­curity feature whose implementation was su­per­vised to a large degree by NOVOSEC. In time for the holidays, Postbank is one of the first private banks to offer their customers the possibility to individually con­fig­ure an upper limit for cash withdrawal with their cash cards at cash dispensers abroad. The card limit can be changed via online banking as well as over the phone. The new limit is effective within minutes.

The possibility to adjust the card limit for cash withdrawals at automated teller machines (ATMs) abroad serves to protect Postbank customers from card misuse. It complements the measures already taken by Postbank to increase the security at ATMs and to protect their customers from financial damage.

Skimming describes a technique where a fraudulent criminal spies out card data to fabricate a copy of the card. The card data is obtained by manipulating a

cash teller's card reader so that the card's magnet strip data can be copied to a forged card. In addition, the entering of the card PIN often is filmed by a pin­hole camera hidden in a plastic panel mounted above the keyboard.

While the stolen data is insufficient to withdraw cash from domestic ATMs (German ATMs have additional safe­ty measures), the criminal can use the forged cards at cash machines abroad, lacking those fea­tures.

"It is here the card limit becomes effective" says Jürgen Weiß, CEO of NOVOSEC AG. "Whenever the customer is in Germany, the foreign card limit should be set to zero. When going abroad, on holiday or on a business trip, the card limit can be adjusted shortly before the withdrawal, using the online banking portal. Afterwards, the limit should be reset to zero im­me­di­ate­ly."

One of the largest German investment companies has awarded NOVOSEC AG the task of converting the monthly statistics for the inter-trade organization BVI to the new and standardized XML-format FundsXML. FundsXML was developed by the FundsXML Standard Committee (FSC) as an open and free standard for funds information.

The services provided by NOVOSEC comprise the overall application design and the implementation of the statistics generator. This includes the data read­out from a database and the conversion of the data into FundsXML-compliant output files.

The project consists of establishing the relevant user demands, defining the organizational and business-specific regulations and deriving the product as­sess­ment criteria from these preliminary stages. Sub­se­quently, an evaluation and comparison of the avail­able systems is conducted.

A document management system handles the ad­min­is­tra­tion and storage of a company's entire process documentation in compliance with the relevant or­ga­ni­sa­tion­al guidelines.

As of late, attacks on internet banking applications using phishing and trojans have been increasing. The media are presenting these attacks as signs for an allegedly inherent lack of security of the PIN/TAN scheme, considering it ripe for replacement.

Such generalizing statements lead to a decreasing acceptance of internet banking as a whole, causing significant cost disadvantages for the banking sector.