Banking with iPad

The risk is the same since you are using wifi. Supposedly the risk would be lower using 3/4G.

I do all my banking with my iPad at home, and will do the same on our trip. I think the trick is to use wifi that is password protected as opposed to public wifi.

I have recurring bills set up to auto pay from my checking account. I won't have to worry about those payments.

Use it for this purpose only if you have secure, password protected wifi that is yours and yours alone, such as what you might have at home. If you use public wifi at a cafe or in your hotel, your iPad, it's information, and every keystroke you make, will be completely accessible to anyone.

Even in the unlikely event that some hacker did manage to get you username and password, what's the worse that could happen? At the banks I use you can only view activity and transfer funds between checking/savings, wire transfers need verification from your home phone. So in a worse case scenario some bad guy moves cash between your own checking/savings...annoying but nothing to lose sleep over;)

Although my knowledge of bank security is limited, if someone had access to your bank account could they set up a payment to a new account? To date, I have paid, primarily credit cards, by authorizing the credit card company to make a one time withdraw from the check account. My thought was that if someone logged into my credit card account all they could do would be to pay off the balance from my checking account? I thought that was safer than setting up payments from the bank side.

It makes no difference what device you use, the encryption used between your device and the bank is still the same. It also makes no difference what so ever weather the WIFI you are connected to is password protected or not. The encryption system between your device and the bank remains the same.

And even if by some chance the encryption system was broken, it would not be much use because banks (at least Europen ones) use two passwords or keys, one that is known to the user and one random one that is generated each time you log in, so that even if a hacker was to break both, the second would almost certainly be invalid by the time they had cracked it.

It is in theory possible that this kind of hack could be carried out, but in 25 years I've never come across or heard of a situation where hackers had the ability to do so. It is possible that the NSA has the ability to crack such passwords, but I doubt they can do it fast enough for it to be of any use to them - that's the reason they have been going around demanding back doors into systems in the first place :-)

If someone is going to get into your account, it will be because you or your bank is careless about security rather than a hacker being able to hack the encryption system. So the most important thing is that you follow to the letter the security advice of your bank.

And of course be careful about choosing a password, I always advise people that it should be something not related to them, but at the same time something they can lookup on Wikipedia! So for instance I might choose the birth place of the first governor of the state of Delaware, with every second letter replaced by a star or perhaps the date of birth of the second MP for the county of Mayo, Ireland, with every zero being replaced with an O and every one being replaced with a lower case L. You get the idea.

I do it all the time.

I've done a lot of research about this because of security concerns. While it is true that the bank encrypts information over Wi-Fi, it is also true that Wi-Fi is much easier to hack than a cellular phone connection over 3G or 4G networks. Here's what one security expert form Cisco has to say about network security: "One way to mitigate Wi-Fi security issues is to limit your usage of hotspots completely. When out and about, away from your home or work network, use the cellular data connection instead. Though it’s slower, most cell service providers encrypt the data traffic traveling to and from cell towers and your device. This greatly reduces the chances of an eavesdropper from capturing your traffic and intercepting passwords and sensitive data not already encrypted -- and giving encrypted traffic double encryption." So when I am traveling, I use Wi-Fi for information, but for a financial transaction, I use my bank's app and connect over a cellular data network.

Thank you for all the feedback. I plan to pay bills before I go but I thought I might want to keep an eye on my accounts since we'll be gone for a few weeks. Thank you!