That Insane, $81M Bangladesh Bank Heist? Here’s What We Know

That Insane, $81M Bangladesh Bank Heist? Here’s What We Know

WHEN REPORTS SURFACED in February of a spectacular bank hack that sucked $81 million from accounts at Bangladesh Bank in just hours, news headlines snickered over a typo that prevented the hackers from stealing the full $1 billion they were after. Last week the snickering stopped with new reports that the hackers struck a second bank, and possibly others—though authorities won’t say if those heists were equally successful.
Bank hacks have traditionally focused on stealing the login credentials of bank account holders—either individuals or small businesses.
Billions have been stolen successfully in this way.
But the hacks in this case targeted the banks themselves and focused on subverting their SWIFT accounts, the international money transfer system that banks use to move billions of dollars daily between themselves. As details continue to trickle out about how the heists unfolded, here’s a look at what we do and don’t know so far. What is SWIFT? SWIFT stands for the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is a consortium that operates a trusted and closed computer network for communication between member banks around the world.
The consortium, which dates back to the 1970s, is based in Belgium and is overseen by the National Bank of Belgium and a committee composed of representatives from the US Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and other major banks.
The SWIFT platform has some 11,000 users and processes about 25 million communications a day, most of them money transfer transactions.
Financial institutions and brokerage houses that use SWIFT have codes that identify each institution as well as credentials that authenticate and verify transactions. What Happened?

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