On Thu, 2007-08-02 at 17:00 -0500, Gabriel Sechan wrote: > Oh, I can believe they'd cover up a million or two. But I don't believe > that its a common occurence. A rare occurence, with a lot of insider > help/knowledge. I could buy this happening a few times a year, to different > banks. But even if its just a million, if it was happening once a month it > would be hard to hide in the bottom line. >
No, it would not be hard to hide. Imagine if the public knew how much money or how often any given bank (or other financial institution) was ripped off. How long do you think that bank would be able to keep more than a handful of accounts? Now imagine if it were widely known that many (if not all) banks are routinely ripped off. How do you think the economy would be affected? The financial industry and governments know how damaging this kind of information could be. Taken to a much smaller level, many large corporations know how damaging it would be if information about the routine cracks and compromised data were to be known (I worked for one such company, and not a single internal compromise was leaked because it would have destroyed the bottom line). Because these losses are electronic, and not physical, it's far easier to hide them than if a truckload (or several truckloads) of money vanished and then wound up somewhere that it wasn't supposed to be. Change a few numbers around and the money never left. It's only been in recent years that stolen credit card numbers - stolen by the thousands - have been reported to the public. Does this mean that it never happened before? No. It's only because recent laws require the disclosure of such a theft to the public. With more and more critical systems switching to insecure PCs, the problems can only become worse before they get better (especially those systems going to insecure Windows based software). PGA -- Paul G. Allen BSIT/SE Owner/Sr. Engineer Random Logic Consulting www.randomlogic.com -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
