Category: Banking + Cyber
Banking Malware: What It Is, How to Spot It, and Why Capitec Has You Covered
Published by Andrew Baker and the Capitec App Security Team | March 2026 For media enquiries and quotable statistics from this article, see the Press Summary at the end. Every day, approximately 15 million South Africans open the Capitec app to check their balance, pay a bill, or send money to a loved one. It […]
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Why Capitec Pulse Is a World First and Why You Cannot Just Copy It
By Andrew Baker, Chief Information Officer, Capitec Bank The Engineering Behind Capitec Pulse 1. Introduction I have had lots of questions about how we are “reading our clients minds”. This is a great question, but the answer is quite complex – so I decided to blog it. The article below really focuses on the heavy […]
Read more →Transcripts from the Meeting Where Core Banking was Invented (A Faithful Reconstruction)
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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A Spy Spent 3 Years Planting a Backdoor to Bring the Internet Down. One Person Noticed
On a quiet Friday evening in late March 2024, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund was running some routine benchmarks on his Debian development box when he noticed something strange. SSH logins were taking about 500 milliseconds longer than they should have. Failed login attempts from automated bots were chewing through an unusual amount of […]
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The Quantum Threat: Why the Encryption Protecting Your Data Today Won’t Survive Tomorrow
Published on andrewbaker.ninja | Enterprise Architecture & Banking Technology There is a quiet revolution happening in physics laboratories around the world, and most of the people who should be worried about it are not paying attention yet. That is about to change. Quantum computing is advancing faster than anyone predicted five years ago, and when […]
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Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was.
The COBOL apocalypse conversation this week has been useful, because it has forced the industry to confront something it has been avoiding for decades. But most of the coverage is stopping at the wrong point. Everyone is talking about COBOL. Nobody is talking about the architectural philosophy that COBOL gave birth to, the one that […]
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The Blog Post That Erased $30 Billion from IBM
Anthropic published a blog post on Monday. Not a product launch, not a partnership announcement, not a keynote at a major conference. Just a simple blog post explaining that Claude Code can read COBOL. IBM proceeded to drop 13%, its worst single day loss since October 2000, with twenty five years of stock resilience gone […]
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The Quiet Power of Free Tier: Why Cloudflare Gets It Right
By Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank There is a truth that most technology vendors either do not understand or choose to ignore: the best sales pitch you will ever make is letting someone use your product for free. Not a watered-down demo, not a 14-day trial that expires before anyone has figured out the […]
Read more →Testing WordPress XMLRPC.PHP for Brute Force Vulnerabilities on macOS
A Comprehensive Security Testing Guide for Mac Users 1. Introduction WordPress xmlrpc.php is a legacy XML-RPC interface that enables remote connections to your WordPress site. While designed for legitimate integrations, this endpoint has become a major security concern due to its susceptibility to brute force attacks and amplification attacks. Understanding how to test your WordPress […]
Read more →Is Banking Complexity a Shared Destiny or Is It a Leadership Failure?
If you look back over time at all once great companies, you will see that eventually simplicity gave way to scale. What are some of the risks that drive this? This is where many great banks lose their edge. But is this really a shared destiny for all banks, or did the leadership simply fail […]
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