Data security for banks and financial institutions

The guarantee is only any good if you can prove you had an account with the entity. I suppose that if they lost all records they would deny you were a customer, your account balance etc. and the onus would be on you to prove matters.

Interesting, I probably should sign up for an on-line vault. My price target is GBP 50/year for 1GB, or GBP 100/year for 20GB.

Considering I get 1GB free from Yahoo! that should not be too difficult.

You`ve got mail, I use a really nice online company. I think it costs $49.95 a year for up to 40 gig. Easy to use, seems nice and quick.

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Your fears are unfounded, for one simple reason, thieves don't want to destroy money, they want to steal it. and there are far simpler methods of concealing such theft. The reality is that you are more at risk from Rock Phish tsunami, or the latest man-in-the-middle compromise of the ATM network. When 100's of thousands of accounts are hit, who do you think will garner the most attention 100's of banks and businesses or your account?

You are guarenteed to 100k in most places, anything more than that and you are out of luck. This is why there are paper bank statements, keep yours.

In message , snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com writes

Without giving away any secrets one very major UK Clearer used to have a bunker next to one of its branches in the north of England where it stored the back up data from all of if its computer centres. The data was updated daily.

At the time that bank had two main computer centres hundreds of miles apart, but the capacity of each centre was sufficient to run the whole national network.

If something happened in London it wouldnt have mattered.

"MANFRED the heat seeking OBOE " wrote

Eh? - Who guarantees that?

In US, FDIC.

"MANFRED the heat seeking OBOE " wrote

We aren't in the US - this is UK.finance!!

LOL. Would *you* survive an EMP 'incident' ? You do know what causes such an 'incident' dont you?

ROFLMAO

yeh, I heard this one about a guy with a hook for a hand who.....

An EMP weapon is the first device that springs to mind. Fairly easy to develop (wrap a conductor around high explosive, and pass a massive current along the conductor at the same time as detonating the explosive at one end. It it`s all designed correctly the explosion moves at the same speed down the device as the current, resulting in a massive EMP). A nuclear bomb would do something similar, but they are hardly difficult to make (certainly not a basic inefficient one). There is a nuclear simulation package available that had the manual pulled because it gave enough information to make a fairly well designed bomb, the numbers you need are easy enough to work out if you know what you`re doing. The only real difficulty is in obtaining enough fissile material, hence the EMP weapon being the easier option. I think the one I saw being discussed was a couple of m long, it`d certainly fit very easily in a HGV, most likely in a box van or even a Transit size van.

I think you are spending too much time on .alt.destroy.the.earth or similar, given it hasnt happened at all, in any variant, including a weeny one that stopped an iPOD working, I'm doubting its *anywhere* as easy as you make out as some jottings on usenet purport it to be. If the OP is as concerned as he seems to be the obvious answer it to spread his assets around and not leave them in one bank, where they are a damn site more likely to be lost through fraud or incompetence than obscure theoretical risks.

jesus, I'll bite your hand off at that rate lol

IIRC I was reading about it in Physics world, discussing the designs for EMP weapons. Physics world BTW is the magazine of the Institute of Physics, the professional organisation for physicists in the UK. Certainly not a magazine for the avarge nutter conspiracy theory fan you`ll find online.

I didn`t say it was easy, designing the conductor to have the current pulse along it at the correct speed to match the explosion, and getting a large enough electric pulse in the first place are 2 fairly big stumbling blocks, but it is certainly possible using known physics - no anti-grav, unknown particles or fields are required for this one. I`d say that it`d be easier than a nuke to develop, as it doesn`t need any fissile material, but IIRC you need a fairly exotic conductor and some weird explosive.

These days they (well one I know of and I assume the others) have backup facilities where the data is kept up to date instanteaneously on another computer (actually more than one) as well as tape copies (that can take days to restore). The switch between the two take seconds and is done on a regular basis (monthly) just to make sure it works when it needs to.

The one I know of has a backup outside the UK as well as one inside.