📚 Some Bangladesh Bank Officials Involved In Heist, Says Investigator

Ruma Paul, reporting for Reuters: Some Bangladesh central bank officials deliberately exposed its computer systems and enabled hackers to steal $81 million from its account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in February, a top investigator in Dhaka told Reuters on Monday. The comments by Mohammad Shah Alam of the Dhaka police are the first sign that investigators have got a firm lead in one of the world's biggest cyber heists. Arrests are soon likely, he said. On Thursday, the head of a Bangladesh government panel that investigated the heist said five bank officials were guilty of negligence but that they were only unwitting accomplices. Alam told Reuters his investigations had discovered that some bank officials had knowingly created vulnerabilities in the bank's connection to the SWIFT system, used for global transactions.Early this year, hackers targeted Bangladesh's central bank to get away with $1bn. At the time, it was reported that the gang behind the raid used stolen credentials to make requests to transfer cash look legitimate. If all the requests had gone unchallenged, the gang would have got away with about $1bn. However, the transfers were stopped when the volume of requests raised suspicions at other banks.

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