Cyber-Crime: Hackers Steal $81 Million in Sneak Attack on World Banking

Bet you did not hear about this during your morning coffee.Your money is not safe in banks anymore folks..between crooked Governments and wily Hackers you are better off using a coffee can.-SF

NEW YORK — Tens of millions of dollars siphoned from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A shadowy set of casinos in the Philippines. A large bank in Bangladesh with creaky technology. An unknown, and perhaps uncatchable, group of thieves with sophisticated hacking skills.

What unites this mysterious mix of elements and enabled one of the most brazen digital bank heists ever is a ubiquitous and highly trusted international bank messaging system called SWIFT.

SWIFT — the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication — is billed as a super-secure system that banks use to authorize payments from one account to another. “The Rolls-Royce of payments networks,” one financial analyst said.

But last week, for the first time since hackers captured $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank in February, SWIFT acknowledged that the thieves have tried to carry out similar heists at other banks on its network by sneaking into the heart of the global banking system.

“There are many banks out there right now saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go us,’” said Gareth Lodge, a payments analyst at Celent, a financial consulting firm.

The admission that the attack was not a one-time event in a developing country but perhaps part of a broader threat has thrust SWIFT into a spotlight, raising questions about how securely money is being moved around the world. Some financial security experts point out the SWIFT system is only as safe as its weakest link.

Read the Remainder at Boston Globe