What if all these so called 'hacking' is done internally? While all the attention is diverted by media to outsiders hacking into the systems, can an insider trade discreetly using your capital and transfer only the profits slowly out from like 10 relatively dormant large accts (used by long term investors,concealing executions on statements)? What is the turnover rate of employees handling these accts? 27 Oct, Marketwatch.com: http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/Story.aspx?guid={FB3B61A9-FB01-4FB8-B454-2A2FC43BDB5C}&siteid= Regulators say they have seen a particularly strong upswing in theft resulting from two types of scams in the last two months. Both frauds involve thieves snaring investors' user names and passwords from public computers in places like hotel lobbies or Internet cafes by using keystroke-monitoring "spyware" to grab the information, according to John Reed Stark, the head of the SEC's Office of Internet Enforcement. One scam involves thieves armed with users' private information liquidating securities and wiring the money to bank accounts, often offshore. Stark calls the second scam "pump and dump--with a technological twist to it." Again using victims' personal data, hackers steal money to purchase microcap stocks in an effort to drive up their share prices. The shares--already owned by the hackers--are then sold at a profit. Stark said regulators have "several investigations" ongoing into online investing-related fraud.
Nah, it was probably bad traders trying to weasel out of a pumped up stock like mncs, by blaming phantom thieves.
I think Windows xp Home Edition is the responsible for some of the on-line hacking. Home Edition is designed for interactive users where they can communicate and view to each others work on screen, since it doesn't allows for changing the Security settings you are about 100% vulnerable to a hacker's attack. I did the comparision between xp Home and Professional and found that xp Pro is much more stable and is much harder to manipulate the settings. xp pro would give much needed security to trade on-line.
I don't have much sympathy for someone who would be so stupid as to use a public computer to access any financial account. Fletch
look here for a tutorial on how to protect your computer from people who have physical access to it. http://traderanalyst.jamroll.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=7
Funny thing... I reconcile my accounts every day. Any unauthorized trade would stand out like a herpes sore... Could not come from my IP address because I have a good firewall... And would be quickly reversed. Can someone post more than idle speculation? Can someone post a link to a ** specific example **... Where a reasonably secure online account was compromised? And please... no more general, mainstream media "horror stories" designed to sell content. Also... Why am I not getting any security concerns or instructions from IB?
Just wondering , can someone else monitor your keystrokes in your immediate wireless vicinity even if you are using your own laptop/pdas/hp through special keylogger technology?
I don't have sympathy for someone who doesn't understand that not everything is perfect ... especially those people above who are so close minded ... :eek: PS. I am referring to you fletchy and I got sympathy for you chief ...