Hacker News Reader

Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

> I have no clue how we have not yet collapsed the financial system via some hack or basic data loss.

Banks are pretty good at not losing data. They're also pretty good at layered security.

I mean there's fraud and theft on all levels, but collapse-level events don't come from "a hack or basic data loss". They come from political incompetence and large scale economic events.

View on HN

> Banks are pretty good at not losing data

Except for that day I logged into Barclays Bank (in the UK) and half the transactions were missing from the last several months of statements.

We're talking maybe 50 transactions just gone from the bank account ledger, which had long since been settled and previously downloaded (that's how I noticed).

To be fair to them, the transactions reappeared a few days later. But it took days, and had me quite worried.

> I mean there's fraud and theft on all levels

you are confusing payment card issuers and processors with banks

I most certainly am not. But there's certainly fraud in those places too. There is all kinds of frauds within banking, from insider trading to cleverly hidden rounding errors being pocketed by software engineers, and everything in between.

Many/most banks are also issuing banks (which means that they issue V/MC cards to their users). And fundamentally credit and debit cards are a source of credit risk and fraud for those banks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com