How Would The Bank Know

[emmie]

i received a text from Barclays saying that as Windows 7
is no longer supported, i should do my banking through the mobile phone.
how would they know i use Windows 7?

also when i go to log into my bank account on the mobile phone a totally different type of numbers system appears.
That is hard to explain..
should i just phone the bank and ask them.

[barry1010]

Because whenever you log in to a website it can see the server string that includes all sorts of information about your pc, your operating system and your browser. It looks like this

109.152.159.2 – – [24/Jul/2018:09:26:44 -0700] “GET /someones-sending-email-address-stop/ HTTP/1.1” 200 47906 “https://www.google.com/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/601.7.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.1.3 Safari/537.86.7”

This shows that the person logging in is using google to search on an Apple Mac computer and the Apple operating system using the Safari browser

[Tuvok]

Not only will they know what operating sytesm you have, they know what browser you use.

Its all to do with the communication between your computer and their web page.

Web pages can be coded to recognise and behave differently depending on the browser used.

[Tuvok]

https://www.whatsmybrowser.org

[emmie]

so not a scam... why does the mobile phone have a different log in page, it comes up with numbers as before but the layout is totally different, this isn't the easiest thing to explain...

[barry1010]

When you log in on your phone you are using a mobile app which operates differently from the website's log in page and sometimes needs a different way of logging in. My bank's app lets me log in with my fingerprint, the website needs a password and a set of numbers

[barry1010]

Answerbank will see the same info and probably knows if you are using an ad blocker :) If you have multiple identities on here they know if you use the same pc to log in

[emmie]

so no need to worry, i can log into the phone as normal...

[Tuvok]

You can log in to a bank through its dedicate app or you can still use the internet.

If the bank detects that you are using a phone or tablet it automatically serves you the mobile internet version.

On the iPad there is an option within Safari to "request desktop site"

[emmie]

i don't have multiple accounts on AB..

[emmie]

i just didn't fancy logging into the phone to find it goes straight to some fraudster.

[barry1010]

I wasn't suggesting that you do, emmie.

[Tuvok]

Never follow a link in an email - go to the website yourself

[emmie]

i will, thanks for all the advice...

[CrapAtCryptics]

A general message maybe and with people still using W7 they will hit often.