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| Bangladesh central bank |
A
spelling mistake in an online bank transfer instruction helped prevent a nearly
$1 billion robbery last month involving the Bangladesh central bank and the New
York Fed, banking officials said.
However,
the unknown hackers still managed to get away with about $80 million, one of
the largest known bank thefts in history.
According
to senior officials at the bank, the hackers breached Bangladesh Bank's systems
and stole its credentials for payment transfers. They then sent nearly over 30
requests the New York’s Federal Reserve Bank to move money from the Bangladesh
Bank's account there to organisations in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
Four
requests to transfer a total of about $81 million to the Philippines went
through, but a fifth, for $20 million, to a Sri Lankan non-profit organisation
was held up because the hackers misspelled the name of the NGO, Shalika
Foundation.
Instead
of writing "foundation," the hackers wrote "fandation."
This prompted a routing bank, Deutsche Bank, to seek clarification from the
Bangladesh central bank, which stopped the transaction.
According
to Reuters, there is no NGO under the name of Shalika Foundation in the list of
registered Sri Lankan non-profits.
The
unusually high number of payment instructions and the transfer requests to
private entities – as opposed to other banks – helped alert staff at the Fed,
which also notified the Bangladeshis, the officials said.
The
details of how the hacking came to light and was stopped before it did more
damage have not been previously reported. Bangladesh Bank has billions of
dollars in a current account with the Fed, which it uses for international
settlements.
The
transactions that were stopped totalled $850-$870 million, one of the officials
said.
Bangladesh
Bank says it has recovered some of the money that was stolen, and is working
with anti-money laundering authorities in the Philippines to try to recover the
rest, Reuters reports.
More
than a month after the attack, Bangladeshi officials are scrambling to trace
the money, shore up security and identify weaknesses in their systems. They
said there is little hope of ever catching the hackers, and it could take
months before the money is recovered, if at all.
Security
experts said the perpetrators had deep knowledge of the Bangladeshi
institution's internal workings, likely gained by spying on bank workers.
The
Bangladesh government, meanwhile, is blaming the Fed for not stopping the
transactions earlier.
"The
Fed must take responsibility," said Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul
Muhith, adding that his country may resort to suing the Fed to recover the
money.
The
New York Fed has said its systems were not breached, and it has been working
with the Bangladesh central bank since the incident occurred to investigate
what happened.
The
hacking of Bangladesh Bank took place sometime between Feb. 4-5, over the
Bangladeshi weekend, which falls on a Friday when the bank's offices were shut,
officials said.
Last
year, Russian computer security company Kaspersky Lab said a multinational gang
of cyber criminals had stolen $1 billion from 100 financial institutions around
the world in about two years.
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