It is absolutely impossible, that somebody in a position like Jerome Kerviel can hold trading positions for 50 bn Euros and burn 10% of that amount. It is impossible, because

• banks nowadays would never rely on simple password protection for their trading systems.
• they all have state-of-the-art identity management in place and manage business roles in a way that one single trader could not crash the whole bank
• such big deals would always be routed through acknowledgement processes where duties are segregated
• Strong Authentication techniques and strict authorization would let all employees of a bank feel, that it is impossible to operate with multiple identities falsifying acqunowledgement processes
• risk dashboards would turn red and start screaming long before such a damage occurs

And, just to be complete: no, it is not possible to attack PIN/TAN online banking transactions, ATM Cards cannot be falsified and it never rains in Hamburg.

In a recent post, I  wrote about those 25 Million British people, whose bank information had been “lost”. Jeremy Clarkson, a British TV presenter, wrote in his Sun newspaper column, that such a loss is of no value for somebody who may now own this data. To proof this, he published his own Barclays Bank account information. He now had to admit, that somebody exploited this information and transferred 500 GBP from his account to some welfare organization. So he either was lucky or didn´t have more on his account, I suppose.