Aspects of espionage and cyberwar can be hyped up, but at the end of the day I don’t know if it’s been hyped enough in the sense that I don’t think people understand how big of a problem it actually is . . .

I do everything online. And I do it on my phone too. I would feel more comfortable doing things on my phone than on my computer, for the most part. On a computer there is so much attack surface to be compromised. Yeah, the iPhone has vulnerabilities, but when you look at the sheer numbers, like the fact that I open up PDF documents all day for work, that’s a lot scarier than the idea that I’m on my phone. I’m also a Windows Mobile guy and a lot of people think it sucks so it’s like running a Mac desktop—nobody cares.

The thing I would never want to put online would be my Social Security number. That kind of identity theft can be a nightmare to clean up. Not even online, but at the gas station where card skimmers are becoming so commonplace. In those cases, it’s better to use a credit card and not your ATM and PIN combination where they can take money out of your account directly. The threat with online banking is that scammers will set up a bill pay account to themselves or do customer-to-customer or some other type of wire transfer. People should set it up with their bank so that their bill payees are locked and they can disable or freeze wire transfers or require a phone call from the bank before such transactions are done.

-from security expert Marc Maiffret (gizmodo)