[ryan_n]

You're missing the point (not sure if you're just being dense on purpose...). If you're bank would just return the money then its not a good analogy. If someone gains root access to your machine, presumably they can do damage that can't be undone. In other words, to continue the bank analogy, they would take all your money and you would have no way of getting it back. Presumably, you would not be ok with this. And even if, for some weird reason, you were ok with that, 99.9% of all other people would not be ok with it.

[stonogo]

Respectfully, I don't think they're missing the point. Banking, as an institution, has its flaws, but deposit insurance isn't one of them. These vulnerabilities exist whether or not they follow specific disclosure rituals, and systems should be deployed with defense-in-depth so that one privilege-escalation flaw is a recoverable event. Inventing tortured counterfactual analogies doesn't change the basic thrust of the poster's point: the account is insured, so getting drained by an attacker is not a fatal problem. Of course people should still take steps to prevent that from happening, but that doesn't mean prevention is (or should be) the only cure.

[ryan_n]

My point specifically is that some damage isn't recoverable if there's a vulnerability that gives someone root access. This makes the bank analogy inadequate in the first place. Im not trying to argue about whether deposit insurance is good or bad. Saying they would get the money back assumes the damage done to ones machine would be recoverable, which may not be the case.

[Modified3019]

My understanding is that FDIC deposit insurance only protects against bank failure, not fraudulent activity. Getting your account drained by an attacker may or may not be covered by a patchwork of other laws at various levels, and you could very well end up shit out of luck.