There is one danger that international banks may have overlooked: hackers. They have always been considered the safest companies in the world. Yet there are those who have managed to break into their security systems more than once.
The alarm was triggered on Friday 5 February, when the Federal Reserve of New York received dozens of payment orders from the central bank of Bangladesh which, with the American institution, has an account with many zeros. Apparently, there was nothing unusual about the transactions, a pity that the money was diverted to some private accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. All this happened while the offices of the Central Institute of Bangladesh were closed. Only the next day did the bank employees realize that someone had attempted to transfer a billion dollars. Much of the money was blocked by the banks even if the thieves managed to send 20 million dollars to an account in Sri Lanka, where they were then stopped by local authorities. An additional 81 million was diverted to the Philippines to be sorted through casinos.
An interbank services system called Swift was used to steal the money together with malware that infected the PDF reader used by bankers to authenticate transactions.
But Bangladesh's central bank was not the only casualty. Two months earlier, in December 2015, Vietnam's TPBank allegedly managed to foil the passage of $1,13 million from its accounts to Slovenia. Even then the Swift network would have been used.
For this reason, the Brussels-based company has decided to spread an alarm, inviting credit institutions from all over the world to review their security systems: "Swift is not and cannot be held responsible for your decision to choose , implement and maintain firewalls, or proper segregation of your internal network,” the company wrote.
