in reply to Change the world with Perl

If you're really interested in this sort of thing, you will want to read The Risks Digest which has been going over issues like this for many years, and is a great source of links on relevant topics like online and overall system security, identity verification and theft, and lots of other paranoia-inducing topics. It's amazing how often great, or at least adequate online security is defeated by attacking the offline links in the chain.