How Hackers Stole 200,000 Citi Accounts Just By Changing Numbers In The URL
I'm kind of torn on this.  On the one hand, yeah, it is a trivial flaw.<p>On the other hand, so is waving a gun at a teller.  That attack has been around for decades and still works a few dozen times a year, because the cost/benefit analysis says that after hardening the banks a little it is easier to just lose a few tens of thousands of dollars every once in a while than it is to give them the Secret Service's attention to physical security.<p>That is hardly the only systemic vulnerability in the banking system.  For example, let's suppose I want to compromise your account number and credentials sufficient to take you for every penny you possess.  You know what I need?  A check of yours.  Any will do.  Everything I need to create a demand draft against your account is on every check you have ever written.  Every employee of every business you have ever paid by check got the keys to your financial kingdom.<p>You may not be aware of it, but since those credentials are assumed compromised, the security is in a) catching me when I use the demand draft to suspiciously drain your account and b) failing that, making you whole out of the bank's pocket.  The numbers have been crunched: it is vastly, vastly more efficient to treat fraud as a cost of doing business than it is to tighten the screws 100%<p>The attack surface on software the size and complexity of a bank's is like the Death Star, except any single rivet being out of place will eventually result in this headline.<p>(Step #1 in tightening the screws would be turn off public facing websites, because inexpert users plus compromised machines means that no banking website will ever be secure, even without coding errors.  This will never happen, because the provable cost savings of moving customers to online banking roflstomp over the marginal fraud risk.)