ID theft victim talks after her bank's web site is hacked

Banks have trouble with crooks setting up phony websites that look just like the bank's real web site, but the real web sites are still vulnerable too. <br/><br/>Bank of Oklahoma got hit with old-fashioned

Wednesday, May 4th 2005, 10:44 am

By: News On 6

Banks have trouble with crooks setting up phony websites that look just like the bank's real web site, but the real web sites are still vulnerable too.

Bank of Oklahoma got hit with old-fashioned hacking last month. News on 6 reporter Steve Berg talked with a customer who was a victim.

Tulsa resident Jody Workman is learning what it feels like to have her identity compromised when she got a letter from the Bank of Oklahoma. "Oh, it scared me to death, of course, of course.â€ Hackers got into the part of BOk's website where people apply online for accounts and loans and such.

In Jody Workman's case, she was applying for a savings account, which requires a social security number among other information. "That's scary, very scary, yeah." Bank of Oklahoma says the Apply Online section of its web site is in a separate server and that the core part of the site, where actual transactions and balance information is kept was not compromised.

They say about 3 percent of customers are affected, including Workman. She was well aware of the so-called "phishing" scams with phony web sites, but never thought she'd have to worry about the actual web site. "I mean they're a large bank, it made me wonder why they hadn't taken steps to secure that information."

The bank says it has gone in and increased the security for that part of the web site. And the bank is giving affected customers like Workman a free year's worth of a credit monitoring service to watch for anyone misusing their information.

By sheer coincidence, Workman was also one of the people whose personal information was on the Oklahoma State University laptop computer that went missing last week. So she's had a rough month. "I guess it's just something that happens in this day and age, nothing we can do about it."

Again, BOk says the vast majority, about 97-percent of their customers were not affected, but they say they're not taking it lightly. They've got the FBI- looking into it, but they don't want to say much more, because they say that might inadvertently help the hackers.