As any security researcher worth the beers you feed them to say security-stuff will tell you, “security thru obscurity” is no security at all. For that reason Rabobank just invented the new “security thru inconvenience.” The new code generator (top left) is larger than the previous generation (top right) and twice as heavy, ensuring you will NEVER have it around when needed. You can see it’s newer because it looks like it came straight out of Austin Power’s swinging 70s.
It’s so impractical there’s virtually no chance you’ll evener bring it out of the house! It’s so annoying to use physically going to your local branch might actually be more convenient than using the internet to do your banking! Heck, this year I’ve been to a physical branch of Rabo more than I’ve logged into my internet bank and I expect this trend to continue now.
Say goodbye to internet banking fraud by saying goodbye to internet banking forever! Never has internet banking been less convenient. Heck, I’ve put my Danish (bottom left) and Russian (bottom right) log-in mechanism in for comparison. Yes, even the Russian system, which require I log in via a Russian-language-only web-page, is more convenient than the new Dutch system.
Let that just sink in for a moment. Even the United Nations under Putin can figure out to make the log-in mechanism which fits in my wallet by issuing a credit card sized code card. Pictured: my Russian Visa card which doesn’t work anymore I presume because of sanctions next to the front and back of code cards with more than 100 codes each. Codes made from numbers scavenged from good old Soviet nuclear plants, yet still better than the Rabo reader which, despite never being carried around due to being bigger than a very tiny tank or a very large (numerically) stack of rubles, is now incapable of showing any codes because the display in a masturbatory tour-de-force fucked itself up.
With Russian-only instructions the Russian log-in mechanism sucks less dong (presumably thanks to Putin) and makes more sense than the boulder-o-vision retro steam-punk Flintstones-technology solution Rabobank dreamt up after presumably huffing up all those drugs they must accumulate after no longer sponsoring professional d̶r̶u̶g̶ ̶r̶a̶p̶e̶ cycling.
My Cyrillic reading ability is way below room temperature, but even I can wrap my head around reading “Телебанк” as “telebank” and make the connection to internet banking, yet I fail to understand why we need this abomination to mankind and all that is good and pure as replacement for a perfectly impractical solution?
What is wrong with something as useful as an app? Heck, if you don’t trust space-age technology such as “portable phones” or “text messages,” what is wrong with middle-age wonders such as “paper with squiggly lines on it”? Even that would be an improvement over this stone-age technology.
Fuck it – I think it’s time to see if ING Nederland or ABN AMRO has a better solution – I hear I can even get a credit card with Britney on it from them instead of this Moscow-design anno 1970 brown card… If you’re form either, feel free to send me an offer; all I need is a financial supermarket that can handle all my bank accounts, credit cards, a bit of day-trading for stuff I’m too lazy to move to my investment bank, and the most common insurances.
(Yes, I know this is ever so slightly more secure than the other solutions as it allows signing transactions based on the credit card chip compartment, but it still won’t stand up to a simple MitM attach which has already been observed in the wild in a.o. Denmark. Just fucking stick a NFC chip on my card and require a phone with a reader to chat up the card using an app showing the transaction details on the phone screen – boom! safer and more convenient.)