How safe is Internet banking Version 1.0, August 2003 How safe is Internet banking?
Or: How safe are banks? Answer: just safe enough so that people will not stop using them. The safety of Internet banking, or the safety of banks in general are a beautiful proof for Hegel’s dialectical principle. A bank features what it believes is a safe environment (Hegel’s thesis). Then a bunch of robbers cracks bank security and gets away with a heist (the antithesis). And only then, the bank installs new security features that obstruct the next bunch of robbers (kind of a synthesis). Banks learn from experience. They don’t learn from logical contemplation. This also applies to me. I got into hacking only after my own e-gold.com account had been hacked “beautifully”, and of course pilfered. And this happened precisely just after for the first time the account held some 800 US dollars. I investigated the matter, and I could now easily hack other people’s bank accounts by exactly the same method, but I don’t, not because I would be an honest person out of principle, but because I don
