Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tenoke | Hacker News Reader

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We aren't seeing banks being hacked and people losing money? Sorry, what?

Here is one comparable hack[0] I remember which followed another series of SWIFT hacks. Further, people lose money all the time to more minor exploits that target just specific accounts, credit cards are always sold (less of a fault of the banks directly but tied to how the system is set up), Robinhood had a data breach recently, etc.

>also I’m sure all the people with money in that exchange would be loving from FDIC insurance right now

Plenty of big exchanges like Binance and Coinbase do have similar insurance and have made users whole after a hack[1]..

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

1. https://www.wired.com/story/hack-binance-cryptocurrency-exch...

The Bangladesh hack would have been much worse if the Fed hadn't been custodian of much of the money: "The Federal Reserve Bank of New York blocked the remaining thirty transactions, amounting to US$850 million, due to suspicions raised by a misspelled instruction" and much of the other money was recovered: "All the money transferred to Sri Lanka has since been recovered. However, as of 2018 only around US$18 million of the US$81 million transferred to the Philippines has been recovered"

Yeah, I wouldn't want to rely on the Federal Reserve Bank noticing a misspelled instruction before my billion dollars were released, but at least there's someone with a brain looking at the transfer before it happens!

From the BBC:

>The RCBC bank branch in Manila to which the hackers tried to transfer $951m was in Jupiter Street. There are hundreds of banks in Manila that the hackers could have used, but they chose this one - and the decision cost them hundreds of millions of dollars.

>"The transactions… were held up at the Fed because the address used in one of the orders included the word 'Jupiter', which is also the name of a sanctioned Iranian shipping vessel," says Carolyn Maloney.

>Just the mention of the word "Jupiter" was enough to set alarm bells ringing in the Fed's automated computer systems. The payments were reviewed, and most were stopped. But not all. Five transactions, worth $101m, crossed this hurdle.

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