As most of money in the world is digital anyways, Why can’t people fake transactions to a Bank account or just add one or two zeros to the balance? What makes online banking so safe that this doesnt work?
Most of even well guarded things have been hacked in the past, so i would imagine it’s at least possible?
In: Technology
There have been digital bank robberies, such as: [Bangladesh Bank robbery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery)
But there’s a multi-layered system of security to try and block these sort of attacks. The reason these attacks worked is that there was inside information and insider-provided access to key systems.
Typically, bank transfers are verified and accepted by one or more banks, which have information about previous transactions and e.g. balances. You can not simply send a transfer message to them; they would not accept it. They only accept specifically encrypted messages, coming from specific origins, and these messages are checked for validity.
Similarly, you can not send a message to Reddit saying that you are now replying to a comment as ‘tzaeru’. There’s technical implementations for why that isn’t possible, but the overall topic is fairly complex and in-depth.
In some cases, the bank receiving or accepting a request does not have full view to the previous transactions and balances. This is the case in e.g. bank transfers across jurisdictions and different banks. There is, indeed, potential for fradulent messages there, but you need inside secrets – such as secret keys, credentials, etc – for those attacks.
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