Keyboard loggers, packet sniffers, trojan horses and plain old mail theft are just some of the tools that someone can use to get access to another person's online financial accounts. With a little ingenuity, passwords can easily be compromised, guessed or intercepted. Evidence of this can be seen in the two cases this year where funds were stolen using the online banking service of a leading Hong Kong bank.
While the media is guilty to a certain extent of playing up security threats because it makes for interesting reading, the fact is that a user ID plus a password or PIN for access to online accounts isn't really enough to deter a determined hacker,...