WaMu Gave Grandma's Money to Crooks

An anonymous reader writes "Net-Security is running an interesting article about some of the problems facing organizations when it comes to identity theft. From the article: 'Identity theft is the major security concern facing organizations today. Indeed, for the banking industry, it is the number one security priority for 2006. Identity security has developed beyond the simplest form of authentication where one party issues and verifies identities within a closed group of users. While easy to do, this approach is extremely hard and costly to scale upwards and offers no interoperability with other authentication networks.'"

Why is this surprising?
The US banking industry has documented policies that permit and encourage this to occur.
Get a 20th century banking system, and these incidents will stop virtually completely.