Bangladesh Bank Governor Atiur Rahman told reporters he was ready to quit after spending seven years in the top bank post.
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The transfer requests, which the Fed says were fully authenticated with the correct bank codes, asked to move the money to private accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka and appeared to come from the Bangladeshi central bank’s servers in the capital, Dhaka.
The reason? The hackers misspelled the name of the NGO, Shalika Foundation.
It was only thanks to a spelling mistake in one of the requests that bank officials became suspicious, querying the transfers and blocking others in the list. The money was reportedly transferred to a few bank accounts in Manila.
Finance Minister AMA Muhith had earlier said he was kept in the dark about the heist for weeks, adding that the central bank management must explain its “audacity”.
Details are beginning to emerge in one of the largest cyber bank heists in history with the governor of Bangladesh’s central bank resigning along with two deputies being fired.
In Dhaka, central bank governor Atiur Rahman said he had resigned to set an example in a country where there is little precedence of accountability and to uphold the image of the institution.
The officials said that these experts feel that the attack originated from out of Bangladesh and the bank is finding out how hackers got into the system through an internal investigation.
Gomes, nonetheless, said Bangladesh was not considering pressing charges against the Philippines as regards the missing $81 million. Some of the officials found the central bank’s computer systems inoperative on February 5, a day after the theft, but didn’t immediately inform their supervisors, the official said.
The malware did more than steal funds, it destroyed the systems which it infected thus disabling the ability to make transfer orders.
The remaining $81 million was transferred to four accounts at a Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation branch in the Philippines, and quickly transferred onward to a fraudulent account at the same branch.
But by that time $81 million had been transferred from Bangladesh Bank’s NY account to a bank in the Philippines.
Bangladesh Bank tried to contact NY on February 6 by email, fax and phone to ask that the transactions be suspended when it realised that the SWIFT interbank messaging system which it normally used was not working properly, Huda said.
The government has made a decision to appoint former finance secretary Fazle Kabir as the new governor of Bangladesh Bank.
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Investigators managed to halt $850 million in scheduled transactions, and cancel a $20 million payment to Pan Asia Banking.
