Online Banking Security

Citizens Bank & Trust Co understands that the security of your personal and account information is important to you. We also understand that our continued success as a financial institution relies on both our ability to offer banking services to you in a secure manner as well as your responsibility in keeping any access codes, passwords or PINs secure. To assist us in offering these Web-based banking services in a secure manner, we employ a number of measures, which are described below. These measures allow us, among other benefits, to properly authenticate your identity when you access these services and protect your information as it traverses the Internet between your PC and Citizens Bank & Trust Co.

Log-In protection for the end user

Every end user must privately maintain a combination of a password and Log-In ID. Because the end user is assigned the original password by the bank administrator, IBS (Internet Banking System) forces the end user to change the password once logged onto the system and before any transactions can be requested. This forces the end user to establish an absolutely private password. If, in case the password is lost or forgotten the administrator will be able to reset a default password for the end user once Citizens Bank & Trust Co has confirmed your identity.

Three (3) strikes and you're out

If an unauthorized person attempts entry into an end user’s account by trying to guess a Log-In ID, IBS will disable the password on the third incorrect attempt, thus invalidating the Log-In combination. If you accidentally activate this security feature by unintentionally miskeying a password three times, you would need to call Citizens Bank & Trust Co at (662) 326-8047 to reestablish the password for that account. For example, a common mistake made by the end user is having the CAPS-LOCK on while keying in a password.

To further protect you, a timeout feature is used. This feature will automatically log you out of your current financial service session after a 15-minute period on our site.

Browser Security

Citizens Bank & Trust Co also requires the use of secure browsers to protect you while you access our online financial services. More specifically, the personal and account information that flows back and forth between your PC and Citizens Bank & Trust Co must be encrypted while in transit – secure browsers are how we achieve this level of protection. Encryption is the process of scrambling information (typically for data transmission) so that it can only be reassembled in its original clear text format by someone who has the correct encryption key to do so. When used between you and Citizens Bank & Trust Co, this technology encrypts your personal information as you send it to us, which only Citizens Bank & Trust Co can decrypt. Likewise, when we send personal or account information to you, this technology encrypts it, which only you can decrypt. This is possible through a certified 128 bit secure server by VeriSign so that no unauthorized individuals can read or decipher the data.

Our server does not connect directly to the Internet

It is isolated from the network via "firewall". All requests to the server are filtered through a router and firewall before they are permitted access to the server. A router is a piece of hardware that works in conjunction with the firewall, a piece of software, to block and direct traffic coming to the server. The router and software "firewall" define and limit access that "outside" computers have to the Citizens Bank & Trust Co server. The configuration begins by disallowing ALL traffic and then opens only when necessary to process acceptable data requests, such as sending customer requests.