Detlef Schmuck: “The precedent at the Oldenburgische Landesbank was not a slip of the tongue, but a harbinger of a decade of digital attacks on financial institutions on a grand scale.
Hamburg, February 6, 2020 – Disruptions in DKB’s online banking, server problems in the computer center of the banking service provider Fiducia, data theft from over 90,000 credit card customers at MasterCard in Germany alone – the hacker attacks on financial service providers in 2019 were just the beginning, fears Hamburg security expert Detlef Schmuck. He predicts: “In the 2020s, we will experience the digital bank robbery on a grand scale”. What he means by this is a horror vision for customers: Looking at the digital bank statement, there is zero, the money was stolen directly from the bank by cyber thieves.
“Unfortunately, this is not a horror vision of the future, but was already a reality for about 2,000 customers of the Oldenburgische Landesbank in the summer of 2019,” says Detlef Schmuck. A maximum of 2,500 euros per customer could be stolen; the thieves got hold of a total of around 1.5 million euros of customer money, the Landesbank had to admit. The digital bank robbers, who are still unknown today, presumably came from Brazil – nothing more precise is known. “It was an isolated case, but you have to be very naive to classify the large-scale digital robbery of banks as impossible in the next few years,” Detlef Schmuck judges. He adds: “It remains to be hoped that the banks will react in these cases in the same way as the Landesbank Oldenburg and compensate their customers for the damage without difficulty. After all, no customer can protect themselves against their bank being looted.”
The security expert Detlef Schmuck is managing director of the Hamburg-based security service provider TeamDrive. With TeamDrive you cannot protect yourself from your bank being robbed, but you can store and encrypt your own data and documents so securely in the cloud that even in the event of theft they cannot be read by a stranger. TeamDrive encrypts the data in such a way that it can only be decrypted by the customer, i.e. neither the provider nor any authority can decrypt the data. This distinguishes TeamDrive from, among other things, all US data service providers, who always retain a key and must also hand it over if there is a justified request from US authorities. At the same time, TeamDrive also offers protection against data loss through ransomware attacks. Users thus have a secure safe for their data and documents in the cloud, hosted on servers in Germany.
