Robbers hacked into a bank in Bangladesh and stole a cool $81 million – but it could have been a lot worse.
Advertisement
On Feb. 4 and 5, hackers broke into the Central Bank of Bangladesh’s servers and stole its credentials for Swift payment transfers, two Bangladesh bank officials told the New York Post.
While the hackers still managed to transfer roughly $80m (€72m) in more than 30 transfer requests, when they tried to move $20m (€18m) to a non-profit organisation in Sri Lanka, a spelling mistake in the request caught the attention of security.
So far investigators have not found any proof of involvement of the central bank staff in Bangladesh, one of the officials said, but added that the probe was continuing.
REUTERS/Brendan McDermidThe corner stone of The New York Federal Reserve Bank is seen in New York’s financial district March 25, 2015.
On top of that, the high number of transactions and the transfer requests to private entities prompted the Fed to alert the Bangladesh Bank.
A group of hackers attempted stealing more than $800 million from a central bank in Bangladesh last month, but the transactions failed when they misspelled the word “foundation”.
The Bangladesh central bank had billions of dollars in its current account, which it used for global settlements, officials have said. The transaction was blocked as was another huge payment instruction that was for between US$850 and US$870 million.
Responding, a spokesman for the Fed refuted the claims from Bangladesh. It’s not clear who the hackers are and officials said there’s not much hope of catching them. Hackers leverage this hole to plant malware on the target computer.
Security experts say the perpetrators had deep knowledge of the Bangladeshi institution’s internal workings, likely gained by spying on bank workers.
The recovered funds refer to the Sri Lanka transfer, which was stopped, one of the officials said.
Advertisement
The Bangladesh government, meanwhile, is blaming the Fed for not stopping the transactions earlier. Officials suspect stolen funds were diverted to banks and casinos and say accounts that received the funds have been frozen. The country’s anti-money laundering authority is also working on the case.
