SBI Urged Customers To Do This To Avoid Banking Frauds: Details Inside

In order to avoid online banking or internet banking fraud that aims to steal the personal credentials of customers, the country's largest lender has issued a way to conduct secure banking transactions. State Bank of India (SBI) has informed its customers via its Twitter handle that "Frequently updating your passwords is a wise step to avoid banking frauds." For updating account or profile passwords online, the lender also has shared some tips for its customers for conducting secure banking transactions.

On its official website, SBI has stated that "The Profile Password provides an additional layer of security to your accounts. Whenever you access any functionality in the Profile tab you need to authenticate yourself with your Profile Password. For example, while setting your mobile number, adding a third party, defining limits for DD and third party transactions, and even while changing the Login password. The profile password is also required to enable high security to your accounts and to issue a demand draft. For enhancing the security, please use multilingual image-based virtual keyboard (MIVKB)."

The bank has also mentioned on its official website that "The Profile password must be different from the login password. Ensure that you set a profile password that consists of a combination of numbers, letters, and special characters/images so that it remains difficult to crack."

Password Creation And Maintenance Tips By SBI

Here are some tips according to the official website of SBI regarding creating and maintaining a strong password. The bank has directly mentioned on its official website that:

• Sharing passwords is a security risk.
• Do not divulge your password to anyone.
• Enter your user-id and password only in the space provided for that you are normally used to.
• Any changes from normal make sure there is no attempt to steal your personal information before providing it.
• Do not provide user-id and passwords on any page that appears as a popup when you click on a hyperlink received through email. A better practice would be to log on to the service by typing in the URL in the address bar after making sure the page opening up is from the genuine service provider.
• Do not store passwords in a file on ANY computer system (including Palm Pilots or similar devices) without encryption.
• Change passwords at least once every 90 (ninety) days.
• Unique Characters: An acceptable password must have at least five (5) different characters. Repeated characters can make for palindromes and make it easier to crack.
• Character Types: An acceptable password must have characters from at least three (3) different character types -- uppercase, lower case, digits, punctuation, etc. A password that includes a sample from a rich character set is difficult to crack.
• Long Alpha Sequences: An acceptable password must not have an alphabetic sequence any longer than three (3) characters.
• Long Digit Sequences: An acceptable password must not have a digit sequence any longer than two (2) characters.
• Forbidden Characters: There are a few characters that will cause problems if used in a password - the "delete" character is one of the obvious ones.
• Writing down your password: One should never write down a password. Someone may discover the password. Make the password difficult for others to guess or crack but easy for you to memorise and remember.

Passwords should not be any of the following:

• Dictionary words (including foreign and technical dictionaries)
• Name of a person or a thing, a place, a proper noun, a phone number or a vehicle number
• Simple pattern of letters on keyboards
• Any of the above reversed or concatenated
• One possible method for picking a good password is to make up your own acronym.
• Do not let your computer remember your password. Do not accept the limousine complete option provided by your computer/ browser.
• As far as possible do not use an untrusted system to access a sensitive service.

To know how to set, and reset your profile password online, you can click here. As creating and maintaining a strong password is always important, SBI has also recently shared 8 ways to do it. Via its Twitter handle the lender has said that "A strong password ensures higher levels of security. Here are 8 ways in which you can create an unbreakable password and protect yourself from cybercrime." To know the ways shared by the lender, please click here.