Botched Bank Hack

Banks are being hacked and losing hundreds of millions of dollars. One bank hack is making news because, ha ha, the hackers made a typo. They only got away with $81M. The typo triggered an alarm that made a human stop over $850M of other transfers that were part of the same hack. If successful, one hack might have cleared nearly $1B. Our economies are fragile, and the financial system behind them are reliant on a supposedly secure technology. Evidently, that technology is not secure. That isn’t much of a surprise, but this hack points out a fundamental difference with bank robberies now. A bank robber was limited by how much they could carry out of one branch of one bank. Now, there only limit to how much can be stolen is the total of all the vulnerable accounts within an institution. An Epic Hack, a series of several such assaults could seriously damage the global economy. It appears to be a practical possibility.

A Typo Cost Some Bank Hackers Nearly £700 Million – Ars Technica