14 DAY TRIAL // As all online deals, brokerage can be the victim of hackers. Accounts passwords can be found out if the proper tools are used. So, people should be more careful when hiring brokers online, as some of them may be scammers themselves, and still others may be using insecure servers, which means your data is going to be in danger.
Security is very important these days and just being a good investor just doesn't cut it. Now, you have to double-check and see that their computers use the latest in computer technology or else all your investments will be at risk.
Internet users are preoccupied by these issues, as GlobeInvestor showed a piece of news about a woman's account being hacked and her actions being sold, only to buy new ones, at a very small firm. It seems that this whole operation was part of a classical scam, where the hacker uses spam e-mail to make a lot of people buy a company's shares to make their price increase, and then, when the price reaches the top, he just sells his shares and gets a lot of money, before the crash-and-burn.
Many accounts have been hacked before, via phishing, spyware and other hacking techniques, but in this woman's case, it's more than that. All those methods need the user to either be infected with a virus or open some suspect e-mail, but this was not the case, since - as the woman stated - she had anti-virus protection on her PC and she hadn't opened any fishy e-mails.
This can only make us think that the hacker had breached the trade company's security system and somehow stole the woman's data from there. The woman's broker was able to restore her account to the way it was before being hacked, still, this is now a concern because nobody knows how it was done and if more security flaws such as this will be exploited; given the hackers' control of people's accounts, this will all end up with the Internet losing lots of credibility and online brokerage going down in ratings.