stltoday.com — Customer accounts at online brokers including ETrade Financial Corp. and TD Ameritrade Holding Corp. have been infiltrated by computer hackers in one of the biggest cases of identity theft to strike the U.S. securities industry.
Oct 24, 2006 View in Crawl 4
pyrotechnickOct 25, 2006
[david attenborough]"An online broker will actually accomodate the hacker up to an extinguishing 16 inches."[/david attenborough]
Closed AccountOct 25, 2006
crap, they broke into mine and didn't even touch my leftover Webvan stock :(
Closed AccountOct 25, 2006
nice title.how bout also: Locksmiths steal home valuables.Mechanics steal car.
bspiesOct 25, 2006
Why don't financial institutions start using RSA Tokens or other form of 2-factor authentication, or at least offer that as an additional security feature for people that want it? They have such a large base they should surely be able to get a good discount on those types of devices. Most large corporations use this technology now for remote access for example. What bothers me more about this is that e-trade and other institutions can link your account to other accounts, to transfer money and such. If someone got into an account like that they could siphon off your checking account or whatever in addition to messing with your portfolio.
signal15Oct 25, 2006
Because it is expensive and they are cheap bastards. Not only do you have to deal with the initial cost, but the ongoing administration of tokens expiring, being lost, people forgetting their PIN's, etc.Figure $40 or so for a token, that will get expensive really fast. And most clients won't care enough to pay for the token themselves unless they are a victim. People don't give a s**t about security, they care about ease of use. I suspect if you gave people the option of omitting a password/authentication from their accounts, a good percentage would actually take it.
versionistOct 25, 2006
I know TD Ameritrade currently uses ADP Clearing for its backend accounting, including customer accounts. I think the same is also true for E*Trade. Maybe someone broke into ADP?
andrebsdOct 25, 2006
E*Trade does offer RSA tokens, but I'm guessing most people won't shell out the $25 for one or have the minimum amount in their account, I think it was $25,000.