Why is this still happening in the 21st century?

Arrigo notes that Italian police broke up a ring that was getting ready to divert funds from the Italian postal service thanks to user logins and passwords it had sniffed on the service's internal network.

The obvious question which should be asked is: why exactly where the user ids and passwords being trasmitted in the clear? This is 2004, SSL has been around for a few years now (not to mention many other encryption protocols).