FBI official: BB heist was state-sponsored
- Reuters
- Published at 03:17 PM March 29, 2017
- Last updated at 08:42 PM March 29, 2017
Last week, officials in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, blamed North Korea
The heist of $81m from the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the New York Federal Reserve last year was “state-sponsored,” an FBI officer in the Philippines, who has been involved in the investigations, said on Wednesday.
Lamont Siller, the legal attache at the US embassy, did not elaborate but his comments in a speech in Manila are a strong signal that authorities in the United States are close to naming who carried out one of the world’s biggest cyber heists.
Last week, officials in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity, blamed North Korea.
“We all know the Bangladesh Bank heist, this is just one example of a state-sponsored attack that was done on the banking sector,” Siller told a cyber security forum.
An official briefed on the probe told Reuters in Washington last week that the FBI believes North Korea was responsible for the heist. The official did not give details.
The Wall Street Journal reported US prosecutors were building potential cases that would accuse North Korea of directing the heist, and would charge alleged Chinese middlemen.
The FBI has been leading an international investigation into the February 2016 heist, in which hackers breached Bangladesh Bank’s systems and used the SWIFT messaging network to order the transfer of nearly $1bn from its account at the New York Fed.
The US central bank rejected most of the requests but filled some of them, resulting in $81m being transferred to bank accounts in the Philippines. The money was quickly withdrawn and later disappeared in the huge casino industry in the country.
There have been no arrests in the case.
A Chinese casino owner in the Philippines told that Senate inquiry he took millions of dollars from two Chinese high-rollers in February. He said the two men were responsible for transferring the stolen money from Dhaka to Manila.
Philippine investigators have filed criminal charges against several individuals and a remittance company for money laundering in connection with the heist at the country’s Department of Justice (DOJ).
None of these cases have yet been filed in court, however.
Siller said the FBI was working closely with the Philippines government “to ensure those responsible for the attack do not go unpunished.”
“So for us in the FBI, it is never over. We are going to bring these individuals to justice so that we can show others, that you maybe be able to muster such attacks, even state-sponsored, but you will not get away with it in the end.”
http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2017/03/29/fbi-official-bb-heist-state-sponsored/
North Korea Link Probed in $81 Million Theft of Fed Funds: Sources
by
Edvard Pettersson
and
Tom Schoenberg
March 23, 2017, 5:46 AM GMT+6
- $81 million taken from Bangladesh central bank account in 2016
- Malware linked to that in 2014 Sony hack blamed on North Korea
The Federal Reserve Bank building in New York.
Photographer: Scott Eells/Bloomberg
The U.S. is investigating whether the theft of $81 million from a Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Fed is linked to North Korea because of the similarity of the hack to an earlier breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment, two people familiar with the matter said.
There’s no indication that charges would be filed soon, said one of the people, both of whom asked not to be identified because the matter wasn’t public.
Some cyber-security experts have concluded last year’s theft from the Bangladesh central bank’s account was done with some of the same hacking tools used in the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures, the maker of the movie “The Interview” that poked fun at North Korea Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un. The Sony hack, linked to North Korea by the FBI, was followed that year by a blackout of North Korea’s internet that a U.S. lawmaker said was retaliation, without saying who was responsible for the outage.
Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Los Angeles office, declined to comment.
Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which said instructions to make the payments were authenticated by the SWIFT message system, widely used by financial institutions. The episode highlighted vulnerable links in the payment network underlying the global financial system and spurred calls for improved security measures for central banks.
The investigation of possible North Korean links to the Bangladesh theft was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.
Malware Link
Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the National Security Agency, said Tuesday at an Aspen Institute round-table discussion that the Sony attack was correctly attributed to the North Korean government. Private sector cyber-security experts have linked the malware used in the Sony attack to that used in the Bangladesh bank theft, he said.
"If that attribution is true, if that linkage from Sony actors to Bangladeshi bank actors is accurate, that means a nation state is robbing banks," Ledgett said. "That is a big deal in my opinion."
Ledgett added that he thinks that nation states are robbing banks.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...nk-said-to-be-probed-in-n-y-fed-account-theft
