This reads like it was written by someone who saw the film swordfish and thought it was accurate. I particularly found the breathless 'he could break in to almost any on-line bank at any time' stuff a bit hard to swallow. There was nothing terribly chilling about the story.
If you ignore the "super hacker" cliche, which I agree is lazy and simplistic, then there is something arguably chilling, or at least sad, about the story. The best and brightest coming up (without alternatives, according to the article) into a life of crime, because their circumstances and environment don't afford the opportunity to succeed as anything else.
Stealing financial information is a lot different than stealing specific financial information. Anyone can dumpster dive, but the trick is knowing what dumpster contains the information on a mark.
I didn't consider dumpster diving when I hear about laptops of millions of customer data stolen and social exploits. Those social exploits are having bank employees put keyloggers indirectly on their own computers and being able to read any kind of information in the system.
Considering that he's doing it from Lagos, it might also mean that security is not very strong.
