campbellmorgan

I was reading https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/nov/11/couple-scammed-57000-homesless-bank-transfer-fraud over the weekend. This involves a 3rd party hacking or imitating the email of a small business and sending invoices for expected amounts with false bank details.

My initial thought was that, with minimal infrastructural investment, Companies House, the UK government site that stores publicly available data on UK registered companies could include an option in which companies could decide to display a secure hash of their sort code / account number made with a common, salted, open-source hash function (ie BCrypt)

Before transferring large amounts of money individuals could either verify bank details via the Companies House website or online banking apps and websites could implement the hash comparison functions.

Would this be usefully functional or are there huge security implications that I am missing? (I'm not a cryptographer)

If the consensus is that this is simple and secure to implement (especially as the gov.uk sites are introducing high quality multi-factor authentication), it is something that I would like to suggest to my local MP.

I'm a lone technical founder. I have been running a SAAS app for just over a year and have a number of paid customers, most of whom do not require much customer service after a week or two of using the site.

The problem with being a lone founder is that it makes it really hard to go on holiday for only a few days without guaranteed internet access for fear of something catastrophic happening and not being able to do anything about it.

Are there any other people out there like me? We could pool resources and watch over each others servers for that one week when you might not be able to get access to internet?

I'm based in London.