North Korea Blamed For Biggest Ever Cyber Heist In Bangladesh Bank

Symantec Corp., a cyber security company finds linkage of $81 million heist from Bangladesh Bank reserve with attacks on a Bank in the Philippines and Sony Pictures. The Mountain View based tech giant expresses its doubt through a blog post published on May 26. However, it has neither disclosed name of the Philippines bank nor clarified whether any fraudulent fund transfer has taken place.

The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has accused North Korea for perpetrating the attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio that took place in 2014. Mandiant, another cyber security company has found instances of penetration by the hackers in several banks of Southeast Asia while probing the Bangladesh Bank heist, reports Reuters quoting one of its senior executives.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh Police has brought into light another cold case that took place three years back in state owned Sonali Bank. The hackers have successfully transferred $250,000 from the largest commercial bank in Bangladesh wherein similar method has been applied in persuading for transferring fund, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal.

The hackers have allegedly deployed a rare piece of code in Bangladesh Bank heist which has been observed only in two previous cases. Researchers in Symantec represent the hacking attack at Sony Pictures in December 2014 and attacks on banks and media companies in South Korea in 2013 as the prior instances. North Korea has been blamed for the attacks by the US and South Korea although both of them have failed to produce any proof verifying their allegations, reports The New York Times.  

If North Korea is hold responsible for the previous attacks, then the nation is also to be blamed for the recent bank attacks, argues Eric Chein, a security researcher for Symantec. He appears first in detecting use of identical codes across all these attacks. The cyber security researcher refers Bangladesh Bank heist as the first ever money swindling by any nation-state in recent years.

North Korea has been compelled to remain out of the global financial system following consecutive UN sanctions and desperately hunting for money, informs Herb Lin, the senior research scholar for cyber policy and security at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Counterfeiting international currencies or committing cyber crimes by North Korea doesn’t at all surprise Lin.