IB has allowed third party wires, in principle, for some time. However, they are a big pain and require lots of documentation to justify the wire, the relationship with the third party, etc. and after providing that, they might or might not allow it. Given the way scammers could abuse this, it's not clear this is a bad thing. In practice, I just wire the money to my bank and then to whoever I want.
Yep noticed the option about 1 year ago, checked a bit at that time and there seemed to a lot of limitstions on those sorts of transfers. Never tried them.
I have heard of cases where hackers have stolen 100s of millions to total of billion from banks. In turn, banks just sucked up the losses "quietly" as making them public would have resulted in customers closing their accounts in hordes. In one case of lady that I knew, $4K was taken away from her account. After due diligence and investigation, the bank refunded her amount. However, such losses like those of shoplifting, stolen credit card charges etc. result in "all" the consumers paying as businesses raise the prices of their goods and services to cover the losses.