The last decade has witnessed the emergence of a plethora of approaches for securing financial transactions over the Internet. During the same period, attacks have matured from isolated exploits to an organized e-criminal industry. In the midst of this evolution stood the End User, whose instances have often been neglected under the assumption that refunding financial losses is all that mattered. This paper analyses the existing deployments of banking services from the perspective of the End User, whose main goal is completing the online transaction. The sole use on the client side of so-called “trusted” hardware devices will be discussed and shown to fall short of the requirements for truly secure banking. A new metric for gauging the effectiveness of security software will be described and applied to measure the practical security of existing Internet banking systems.

 KEYWORDS: Security, Online Transactions, End User.