With banking increasingly being done on the internet, many questions have come up
about security. Through cryptographic technology, information is protected as it
is transmitted across the internet. This technology is a form of scrambling the
data as it is sent.
Great Eastern Bank of Florida uses 128-bit encryption, the highest form of encryption,
reserved primarily for financial institutions. As an example, to break the coding
on 128-bit encryption, it would take a hacker 10,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
years provided he could harness the power of a 1,000 CPUs, and type 1,000 characters
per second, 24 hours a day. 128-bit encryption is based on the browser; Microsoft
Internet Explorer version 5.0 and Netscape version 4.74 or above have 128-bit encryption.
Other security tools are available to ensure the integrity of your data: firewalls
and filtering routers are used to secure computer from Internet access, and a "trusted"
operating system is employed to protect the information from both internal and external
threats.
For added security, customers are required to determine their own unique Personal
Identification Number (PIN), and PIN guessing is deterred by locking a user out
of the system following three unsuccessful attempts. The bank administrator must
reset the PIN in order for the customer to reactivate the account. These are just
some of the full range of Internet security tools we use. These layers of security
work together to make sure that all information transmitted between you and the
bank is both secure and authentic.