Are You Trading Stocks Securely? Exposing Security Flaws in Trading Technologies

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Presented at CODEBLUE2018@TOKYO 2018 by

Alejandro Hernandez

With the advent of electronic trading platforms and networks, the exchange of financial securities now is easier and faster than ever; but this comes with inherent risks. Nowadays not only rich people can invest in the money markets, but also anyone with as little as $10 could start trading stocks from either a mobile phone, a desktop application or a website.The problem is that this area of the fintech industry has not been fully under the cybersecurity umbrella. Sometimes we assume that a product is secure by its nature, such as technologies that are used to trade hundreds of billions per day, but security testing tells us a different story.In this talk, vulnerabilities that affect millions of traders will be shown in detail. The analysis encompassed the following platforms:- 16 Desktop applications- 30 Websites- 34 Mobile appsFinally, the gap between the security in online banking vs trading technologies will be clearly observed. There's still a long way to go to improve the security of the trading ecosystem, but the wheel is already invented, and common security countermeasures could be applied.