Bangladesh Bank officials perhaps played a part in 81m heist

Officials of Bangladesh Bank may have been involved in the calculated theft of 81 million from its account with the New York Federal Reserve Bank, the head of a government-appointed panel investigating the cyber heist has told reporters. After learning how the organisation worked, the group of cyber attackers broke into the computer systems of the Bangladesh central bank in February and issued instructions through the SWIFT network to transfer 951 million of its deposits held at the New York Federal Reserve Bank to accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The group had installed malware in systems at the bank's Dhaka headquarters, which allowed them to spend several weeks spying upon the bank's systems and processes. Most of the transactions were blocked but four went through, amounting to 81 million, sparking allegations by Bangladeshi officials that both the Fed and SWIFT had failed to detect the fraud. The breach was uncovered by accident, with an alert only raised as a result of a small spelling error on one of the transactions that blocked other queries that had not yet been processed.