Hackers’ $81 Million Sneak Attack on World Banking
Post Date : May 1, 2016 | 7:47 pm
Tens of millions of dollars siphoned from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A shadowy set of casinos in the Philippines. A large bank in Bangladesh with creaky technology. An unknown — and perhaps uncatchable — group of anonymous thieves with sophisticated hacking skills.
What unites this curious cast of characters and enabled one of the most brazen digital bank heists ever is a ubiquitous and highly trusted international bank messaging system called Swift.
Swift — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — is billed as a supersecure system that banks use to authorize payments from one account to another. “The Rolls-Royce of payments networks,” one financial analyst said.
