back to article Hackers nick $60m from Taiwanese bank in tailored SWIFT attack

Hackers managed to pinch $60m from the Far Eastern International Bank in Taiwan by infiltrating its computers last week. Now, most of the money has been recovered, and two arrests have been made in connection with the cyber-heist. On Friday, the bank admitted the cyber-crooks planted malware on its PCs and servers in order to …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bank wire transfer?

    No, that's definitely a laptop.

  2. mr. deadlift
    Trollface

    i see what you did there...

    tailored... swift, very good.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Terminator

    SWIFT nasty software malware cyber-heist ..

    "There has been a spate of attacks against banks to subvert the SWIFT system in the past"

    Except they didn't subvert the SWIFT system, they subverted the underlying Windows computer. The malware delivered in word documents as email attachments that suppressed SWIFT alerts sent to the printer from the Oracle database. Specifically by disabling a running Windows process by overwriting two bytes in memory.

    "thanks to security mechanism introduced between banks – all but $500,000 has now been recovered."

    I would suspect successful recovery had more to do with competent auditing processes than anything to do with security mechanisms. What they mean is we didn't notice the withdrawal until notified about it by some third party. For any would be fraudsters out-there, never use your own personal bank account to facilitate an online cyber-heist :)

    ref: bank,computers, credentials, cyber-heist, cyber-robbery, electronic, hackers, heist, malware, mechanism, money, network, north korean, security, servers, software, SWIFT, terminal, transactions ..

    1. Brian Miller
      WTF?

      Re: SWIFT nasty software malware cyber-heist ..

      It's frightful that so many companies use Windows systems for financial transactions. I worked at one place where they had a Windows computer specifically for bank transactions sitting outside of the firewall. They trusted it to do the transactions, but didn't trust it to be inside the corporate firewall. I have no idea why people keep writing high-end financial software for Windows.

      1. Charles 9

        Re: SWIFT nasty software malware cyber-heist ..

        It could well be that the banks pushed back too hard to resist. A standard isn't any good if no one uses it.

    2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: Walter Bishop

      We've tweaked the story to make it clear - it was the banks' equipment that was hacked, not SWIFT's infrastructure.

      C.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Such service!

    Funny how the bank can get faster access to stolen money than paying customers can to legit international transactions.

  5. dnicholas

    Patsy

    Perhaps the $1.1m placed in the guy's personal account was a red herring. If I were pinching that sort of money I'd make sure I had some patsy or two lined up

    1. RyokuMas
      Facepalm

      Re: Patsy

      I'd like to agree, but in my experience, people really are that stupid.

  6. cantankerous swineherd

    stealing a squillion dollars via some piece of crap connected to the swift system isn't subverting the network. no siree, totes no subversion going on here.

    1. Charles 9

      Put it this way. As a comedian once said, "You can't fix Stupid."

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