The SWIFT secure messaging service that underpins international banking says it plans to launch a new security program as it fights to rebuild its reputation in the wake of the Bangladesh Bank heist, reports web portal ZDNet.  The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication's (SWIFT) chief executive, Gottfried Leibbrandt, is expected to tell a financial services conference in Brussels that SWIFT will launch a five-point plan later this week. SWIFT is a Belgium-based co-operative which is owned by its users, with banks around the world sending payment instructions to one another via SWIFT messages. In February, the SWIFT system of the Bangladesh central bank was hacked into, with thieves sending messages to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York that allowed them to steal $81 million.
After learning how the organisation worked, the group of cyberattackers stole the Bangladeshi bank’s SWIFT code and made a series of transaction requests for cash to be sent from the country’s New York-based account to entities across Asia, mainly the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
The group had installed malware in systems at the banks’ Dharka headquarters, which allowed them to spend several weeks spying upon the bank’s systems and processes.
The breach was uncovered by accident, with an alert only raised as a result of a small spelling error on one of the transactions which blocked other queries that had not yet been processed.
It emerged last week that those behind the heist actually targeted the computer of a Bangladeshi official to conduct the theft. The attack follows a similar but little noticed theft from Banco del Austro in Ecuador last year that netted thieves more than $12 million, as well as a previously undisclosed attack on Vietnam’s Tien Phong Bank that was not successful. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that SWIFT was never told of the Ecuador attack. “We need to be informed by customers of such frauds if they relate to our products and services, so that we can inform and support the wider community,” spokeswoman for Swift, Natasha de Teran said. “We have been in touch with the bank concerned to get more information and are reminding customers of their obligations to share such information with us.’’
The crimes have dented the banking industry’s faith in SWIFT, with Leibbrandt expected to say in his address that the Bangladesh Bank hack was a “watershed event for the banking industry”.