Security Policy

Lamar Bank and Trust Company will NEVER initiate a telephone call or email requesting a customer's non-public, personal information, including account number.

This Internet Banking System brings together a combination of industry-approved security technologies to protect data for the bank and for you, our customer. It features password-controlled system entry, a RSA-issued Digital ID for the bank's server, Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol for data encryption, and a router loaded with a firewall to regulate the inflow and outflow of server traffic.

To begin a session with the bank's server and verify a user’s identity, the user must key in a Log-in ID and a password. Our system, the Internet Banking System, uses a "3 strikes and you're out" lock-out mechanism to deter users from repeated login attempts. After three unsuccessful login attempts, the system locks the user out, requiring the user to contact the bank to reset the password before re-entry into the system. Upon successful login, the Digital ID from RSA, the experts in digital identification, authenticates the user's identity and establishes a secure session with that visitor. This multi-factor identification uses characteristics of a user’s computer to create an electronic fingerprint that validates the device authenticity each time a user logs in. For users who have multiple computers, supplemental authentication confirms their identity when using a device not yet registered. They must correctly answer a challenge question defined during enrollment in order to log in from a new computer.

Once the server session is established, the user and the server are in a secured environment. Because the server has been certified as a 128-bit secure server by RSA, data traveling between the user and the server is encrypted with Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. With TLS, data that travels between the bank and customer is encrypted and can only be decrypted with the public and private key pair. In short, the bank's server issues a public key to the end user's browser and creates a temporary private key. These two keys are the only combination possible for that session. When the session is complete, the keys expire and the whole process starts over when a new end user makes a server session.

Requests must filter through a router and firewall before they are permitted to reach the server. A router, a piece of hardware, works in conjunction with the firewall, a piece of software, to block and direct traffic coming to the server. The configuration begins by disallowing ALL traffic and then opens holes only when necessary to process acceptable data requests, such as retrieving web pages or sending customer requests to the bank.