[chubot]

So are you saying that bank IT is no better than corporate IT? They don't have any special software or policies? (like the star network thing I mentioned)

I would honestly expect it to be a bit better than average. I suppose there are many different types of banks and they all vary. Let's just consider your chain banks like Wells Fargo or BoA, since I'm sure somebody around here has worked at one of those places.

[busterarm]

I used to work in financial IT.

Across the industry it's generally better than corporate IT. A lot better. However, it varies widely by sector.

Companies with trading floors or that interact regularly with traders have the best IT practices in the industry. Banking conglomerates are kind of messy - they combine IT operations for each business and never change anything and the systems don't cooperate.

I remember one such company's backup procedures. At that point they were made up of 13 separate large (regional/national) banks. They were trying to standardize the backup procedures between all the banks and run them from a centralized system. At the time that I got there, the nightly backup process failed every single day for over a year and a half. I didn't even get a computer or working logins to be able to do any work for nearly a month. Anyway, getting it to work involved getting the people responsible for the backups at each individual bank's IT group to get their system to cooperate. All of them knew that this would be putting them out of a job at the completion of the project, so there was tons of resistance and it usually took a week of calling peoples' bosses to get the work done. This was also in the middle of forced relocations for most of them. Most of the folks responsible for the work quit. It was really ugly.

[aidos]

To be honest, I have no experience - so I can't say, if the description in the article is at all accurate though, they're in a pretty bad way:

"The cybercriminals sent their victims infected emails — a news clip or message that appeared to come from a colleague — as bait. When the bank employees clicked on the email, they inadvertently downloaded malicious code. That allowed the hackers to crawl across a bank’s network"

There must be plenty of people on HN with experience in this field, so it'll be interesting to hear their take on it.

My (very ranting/rambling) point was that I've seen other large organisations pretending to do security (and probably believing it themselves), where it's really just security theatre.