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Spelling mistake saves $1 billion from hackers
How often have you heard of someone being put behind bars because of a typo? Well, that’s exactly what saved the Bangladesh Central Bank and the New York Federal Reserve from losing nearly a billion dollars! For those trying to convert the astronomical number to Indian currency, it amounts to Rs 66,97,24,50,000.
How often have you heard of someone being put behind bars because of a typo? Well, that’s exactly what saved the Bangladesh Central Bank and the New York Federal Reserve from losing nearly a billion dollars! For those trying to convert the astronomical number to Indian currency, it amounts to Rs 66,97,24,50,000.
The story goes that an unknown group of hackers broke into Bangladesh’s central bank, obtained the necessary credentials needed for payment transfers and then transferred them in large batches to fake bank accounts in Sri Lanka and the Philippines. But you can never be too sure of anything it seems, since a spelling error foiled their entire plan. Having said that, they still managed to get away with $80 million, making this one of the largest bank thefts recorded in history.
According to Reuters, the hackers managed to make their way in Bangladesh Bank’s systems and stole its credentials used for payment transfers. They then made their way to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with several requests to transfer the amount from the Bangladesh bank to their fraudulent accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka. Four requests worth about $81 million did manage to go through to the Philippines, but failed on the fifth request, for $20 million to a Sri-Lankan non-profit organisation, because they got the spelling of the NGO, Shalika Foundation, wrong!
Hilariously, the hackers misspelled “foundation” as “fandation. This prompted the routing bank, Deutsche Bank, to check with the authorities at the Bangladesh bank, who stopped the transaction immediately. Shalika Foundation does not exist in reality and was something made up by the hackers.
The typo made the bank keep their guards up, therefore saving a further loss of $850 million. The authorities are yet to catch hold of the $80 million stolen or the hackers who are known to be operating from outside the country. The Bangladesh Central Bank, on the other hand, are planning to file a lawsuit against the Federal Reserve in order to recover some of the lost funds. They say that the Federal Reserve should have stopped the transactions from taking place.
Source:Techgig
