Cheap Routers Blamed For $80 Million Bank Hack

You can never go wrong with networking equipment that provides strong security, particularly if you’re a financial entity or a government agency, in that case, you can never have enough security on your network. You might have heard about the $80 million bank hack recently, if it wasn’t for bad spelling it would have been an $800 million hack, apparently cheap routers are to blame for this incident.

A group of hackers had managed to hack into the servers of the Bangladesh Bank and stole around $80 million by flooding the Federal Reserve Bank in New York with requests for transfers to offshore companies in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

An investigation is ongoing and Reuters reports that the Forensic Training Institute of Bangladesh police has found in its investigation that second-hand $10 network switches are to be blamed. The bank was using these switches without a firewall to link all of its computers. This is why it was easy, so to speak, for the hackers to get access to the bank’s servers.

Since those computers happened to be connected to the SWIFT global payment system they were able to flood the Fed in New York to make high-value transfers. If it wasn’t for the spelling error they would have made off with more than $800 million.

The hackers involved in this daring heist haven’t been found yet but police say that it has found 20 people who were on the receiving end of some of the payments that did go through.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: General
Tags: Hacking