In the 12+ years of doing penetration tests against various critical environments, we've seen numerous online banking servers and found all sorts of vulnerabilities in them, including bugs that allowed users to take money from other users' accounts, make unlimited overdrafts on their own accounts, transfer negative amounts to other accounts (effectively sucking other users' money from these accounts) and even - frightening as it may sound - create unlimited amounts of money out of thin air.
These types of critical bugs in financial systems are not nearly as rare as one would hope; in fact, our experience shows that at least one such defect exists in your online bank if it hasn't been thoroughly and regularly reviewed by different researchers with a lot of knowledge about banking vulnerabilities and attacks. (As a rule of thumb, if your bank's penetration testing call for proposals contains the word "scanning" or specifies the number of IP addresses to test instead of focusing on application code and logic, their online systems are likely hosting various logical security flaws.)
While such vulnerabilities can allow an online thief to take a lot of money from bank's customers or the bank itself, doing so would positively qualify as a punishable criminal act in most jurisdictions.


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