In the unlikely event that an unauthorised transaction does occur on your account, Country First guarantees that you will not be liable for any unauthorised transaction carried out provided you meet your obligations under their Conditions of Use, the ASIC Electronic Funds Transfer Code of Conduct and you haven't contributed to the loss.
Country First Credit Union trusts their IT Management with local firm Veritech Corporation, who specialise in IT network security and firewalls. Veritech were recently awarded Australasian distribution rights for the Endian UTM (Unified Threat Management) system,which is an all-in-one firewall system suitable to businesses of all sizes.
How Safe is Online Banking?
Just as in the safekeeping of your money, the banking industry in Australia has an obvious ethical, legal and business responsibility to ensure the security of information. In the case of Country First Credit Union, Veritech operate extremely secure networks. In fact, the back-end banking systems are connected using a Virtual Private Network which is separate from the Internet altogether.
The real risk is when users like yourself, inadvertently or unknowingly give access to their bank account to others – and in particular, those professional criminals who prey on computer users.
I use online banking almost on a daily basis, and I have utmost trust in the online banking systems. But I do follow some simple security practices, and it’s important you do to. These don’t apply just to online banking, but really any use of the Internet. With banking however, security breaches on your account will affect your money, so it becomes so much more important!
Safety With Internet Banking
Never respond or act on requests within emails which appear to come from a bank. They will most likely be a hoax, and could be seeking to obtain your passwords (often called Trojans or ‘phishing’). You also need to protect your computer. The most important thing you should have is virus and spyware protection, as well as firewalling, all which must be installed on each of your workstation computers. One of the real failings of anti-virus software is that it not only needs to install more programs onto your disk, by design, it has to slow down your computer! If an anti-threat system is not scanning your computer continuously, then it’s not really protecting your computer properly! Every file you open needs to be checked. Every email you receive needs to be scanned. Every internet download and browse needs to be monitored. You can be sure that at least one of them has spyware embedded, a Trojan hiding inside, or a nasty virus waiting to jump into your computer’s hard drive! So, while the anti-threat software is busy scanning stuff, it takes away processor time from all the important things you really need to do on the computer!
Gateway Protection
If you run a business, and you need Online banking, then you need to have appropriate gateway protection in place. That is, the point where the internal network meets the Internet. This has a number of obvious benefits, seeing as the majority of threats originate from the Internet. Catching them head on, before they get to your workstations, is cost-effective, scalable and smart.
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