Hackers steal $81 million from a bank that had no firewall

Sometimes the best way to learn is from your mistakes, or at least someone else’s mistakes. The central bank of Bangladesh just gave all of us future bank owners a very important lesson — don’t skimp on network security.

Hackers managed to steal about $81 million from Bangladesh Bank thanks to the bank’s use of $10 network switches and a complete lack of firewalls, Reuters reported. It is one of the largest amounts stolen from a bank at once in history.

The theft happened in February when the hackers got into Bangladesh Bank’s systems, grabbed credentials, and then made dozens of requests from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to move money from Bangladesh to accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. The transactions were stopped because they made a typo, spelling “foundation” as “fandation,” which caused a routing bank to question the Bangladesh Bank. Read more...