Special protective functions are intended to make life difficult for cybercriminals, because even if a Trojan is already lurking on the computer, online transfers are not a danger. The Sparkasse's new S-Protect browser is intended to make this possible and is advertised on the website:

“Our S-Protect is a so-called hardened banking browser. You can best think of it as an additional protective shield for online banking. S-Protect prevents Trojans and other malware that may be hidden on your computer from spying on or manipulating online banking. Setting up and using S-Protect is child’s play and gives you a great security advantage in all financial transactions.”

Source: Sparkasse am Niederrhein

The system description goes on to say that S-Protect is a “hardened browser”. You can imagine it as “a kind of all-round protection for all financial transactions in the savings bank finance group.” We are talking about a secure area that you open for your online banking and which you cannot penetrate from the outside. “This means you can move in a protection zone outside the reach of data thieves,” says the Sparkasse’s website. Browser and Windows functions as well as all page views would be controlled by S-Protect and ensure that you can only move on “the good, secure pages of the Sparkasse and those of the affiliated partner companies.”

The S-Protect browser was developed by the software manufacturer Coronic. Security is guaranteed by a so-called whitelist. Addresses that cannot be found on this list are blocked by the browser. Access to manipulated or unsafe sites is prevented from the outset. “This works so well that S-Protect enables online banking even on infected computers (of course, in this case we do not recommend further use, but rather an immediate cleanup),” is the official description of the banking browser from Sparkasse.

Big promises, but what's behind them?

The computer magazine c't , which is published by Heise Magazine, has tested the banking software. The focus was on the reliability of the protection zone for online banking against access by other processes.

In fact, S-Protect blocks access to all websites that are not on the whitelist.
This ensures that you don't end up on a phishing website - a sensible restriction with a real security gain, according to the c't test. The virtual on-screen keyboard and the automatic filling of the bank website login form by S-Protect are also positively mentioned.
In both cases a hurdle for keyloggers. c't actually doesn't give Sparkasse's browser a bad rating. However, there is criticism for the claim that secure banking is possible on infected computers. computerbild.de also reports on it and summarizes the results of the Heise editors:

“It turned out that this promise could not be kept. The protection for obscuring keyboard entries can be tricked using on-board tools and the virtual keyboard can be screenshotted, the browser window was manipulated with overlay windows, access data could be found in plain text in memory dumps. The program itself could also be manipulated and partially replaced with malicious components. It was vulnerable to DLL hijacking, which Heise managed to use to create a backdoor.”

Source: computerbild.de

As can be read from Heise and computerbild.de , the manufacturer Coronic has responded to the defect notices and brought a new version onto the market. You can read Coronic's counter statement HERE . c't is also not entirely satisfied with the new version of S-Protect. computerbild.de attests to the browser:

“It is therefore best not to carry out online banking on infected systems. On a normal PC with a good protection program, the latest version of S-Protect makes perfect sense.”

This might also be of interest: Malware in the router – an underestimated danger

Sources: Sparkasse am Niederrhein , c't , computerbild.de , Heise , Coronic


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