Wow this made me laugh. I spent long time working for banks, financial institutions, and credit agencies. "So many things that lock the account down" Really

Wow this made me laugh. I spent long time working for banks, financial institutions, and credit agencies. "So many things that lock the account down" Really? Out of ALL of articles about breaking into systems leveraging techniques like lateral attacks on systems, and this is supposed to be believable. People ask me what it was like working there as far as processes etc. I always say the same thing. "Banks are like the mafia. They have a lot of money, and they don't like giving any of it away." Banks (especially) care about 2 things, money and risk. They spend just enough money to mitigate the risk and then stop. What this means is that they may buy good systems to help with security administration, but rarely did I see them take extra time to make sure they have multiple security redundancies like Troy describes. Employees were "trained" to what the letter of the law required. Don't get me wrong, there were some great people there, but let's not pretend they only hired from a select group of highly trained and extremely smart people. It's just like almost anyplace else. Employee's and contractors are there to get a paycheck and go home. They do what risk wants and when their done, bam they go home til tomorrow, because the fights just not worth it after a while. I briefly worked with a sales guy from a vendor we used, and he used to work in the banking industry. He had the best quote (that I shamelessly stole) to describe banks. He said, "If people knew what I know about banks, mattress sales would skyrocket."