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by PeterisP 3290 days ago
Credential storing is a big risk.

While it may be true that there hasn't been historical fraud attributed to "screen-scraping", what has been seen historically is insider fraud - you pretty much have to expect a certain rate of incidents where your own employees, included tenured ones in high trust positions, will intentionally risk jail time and attempt to steal money; in the finance industry (despite all reasonable precautions) it's not a question of if it will happen, it's a question of how often it'll happen (i.e. if it's 1 incident per annum per 100 employees or if it's 1 incident per annum per 1000 employees), how large will be the impact (most precautions don't prevent the risk as such, but limit the amounts involved), and what are you going to do about it.

E.g. the idea that your main technical administrator might sell a database of stored credentials to organized crime; (or get his/her family kidnapped in order to get access to them, that has happened as well) isn't ridiculous fiction, it's a rare but feasible scenario that's more likely to happen than e.g. a datacenter burning down, so what you're going to do in similar cases is quite relevant, not only to your own internal risk analysis but also to your customers. A bank might say "oh, we've got it covered, but if a major hack-event happens, our capital reserves and deposit insurance will still guarantee that you don't lose your savings" - an API company can't fall back on that.