Right, but OP is not talking about theft, OP is talking about someone (with possible short interest) creating havoc by causing people's staking nodes to behave in a bad way caused them to be slashed. You can't get the money they lost (it's gone for good), but you might be able to profit of a short position, or with a more sophisticated scheme, a resulting fork.
I see - I am sure those sort of attacks will happen. If you secure thousands of ETH in a single validator and are tied with something that could be shorted - such as a company and its stock or token - then your situation is just as vulnerable to attack as keeping your cold wallet in your home's safe. Somebody could break into your house and either coerce you to provide the staking keys, or crack the device, or find another vulnerability if your opsec is not effective enough. If you're staking in the cloud with Amazon you are probabbly even more vulnerable.
But isn't this the whole idea? By staking, you are placing your capital at risk in order to help secure the network. This is how staking is often described by Ethereum developers.
> or with a more sophisticated scheme, a resulting fork
You might be able to create enough havoc in the staking system to cause a fork, and you might be able to preposition buy and sell orders (selling very early on the fork you don't favor, not selling on the one you do favor, and using the money you made by selling to buy more in the fork you favor as soon as possible, possibly from an automatic market that springs up within minutes. You would then use your position to make money as the price of the fork rises, closing out all positions before the whole thing goes down again.)
