LONDON—In 1910, one of the last remaining bands of outlaws of America’s Wild West emerged from their hideout in the Sierra Ladrones Mountains in New Mexico and heisted a Wells Fargo shipment. The Sierra Ladrones (literally, in Spanish, Robbers’ Mountains) are only 45 miles as the crow flies from Albuquerque, but in 1910 there were an un-policed wilderness. The gang retreated with their booty and hid in the canyons. It took two years for the bounty hunters employed by Wells Fargo to track them down, ending inevitably in a final fatal shootout.
Today’s robbers hit banks with cyber attacks, not shotguns, and have no need to dynamite safes to get access to far greater sums of cash than the treasure boxes of Wells Fargo. They can conduct their raids from anywhere—the other side of the world or down the street....
