SL LINK TO US$ 81 m cyber heist
Attempted transfer of us$20m to lankan ngo :
Typographical error halts transfer:
Shalika foundation found to be bogus:
by Manjula Fernando
 Sri Lankan authorities are investigating the US$ 81 million cyber
heist of Bangladesh Central Bank money from the Federal Reserve of New
York, in the backdrop that millions of US dollars were to be transferred
to a Colombo-based NGO bank account.
While the hackers succeeded in transferring US$ 81 million to a bank
account in the Philippines successfully, the attempt to transfer US$ 20
million to a Sri Lankan non-profit organisation– Shalika Foundation,
failed due to a typographical error.
According to the NGO Secretariat website, accessed at: http://www.ngosecretariat.gov.lk/,
the said organisation does not exist.
The Financial Investigation Unit of the Central Bank and the CID will
conduct investigations on the involvement of the Sri Lankan NGO, which
was registered recently.
The case has sent shockwaves in the international banking sector with
cyber security firms working double shift to review how secure their
cyber transactions were.
It is believed that sophisticated malware had been used to penetrate
the Bangladeshi Central Bank and sneak into the Federal Reserve’s high
security system to transfer the funds. The hackers had stolen
credentials of the Bangladesh Central Bank. A total of US$ 81 million
had been swiped by the time the alarm bells rang.
The aim had been to transfer US $ 1 billion. The lid was blown off,
when the hackers misspelt the name of the Sri Lankan non profit
organisation, promptly resulting in a re-check and the Federal Reserve
halting the transactions.
The Wall Street Journal quoting a Bangladeshi Bank official and an
official of the Ministry of Finance said, “Up to 35 transfer requests
had been sent to the Fed through an interbank messaging system known as
Swift on February 5.” The CID remained secretive about the
investigation. A high-ranking official denied any knowledge of the case
while two other sources confirmed the CID was indeed involved in the
case as well as the Financial Crimes Unit of the Central Bank. The FIU
directly handles any crime involving the local banking sector. So far
there has been no proof that Bangladeshi Central Bank officials were
involved but it is believed that a malware known as Remote Access Trojan
had been used to gain remote control access to the Bangladeshi Central
Bank computers for the virtual transactions.
Bangladeshi banks close on Fridays and Saturdays, and the New York
banks on Saturdays and Sundays.
The hackers knew that chances of communication between the two banks
would have been minimum on Friday, the day the transactions were made,
international media reported. |
