WASHINGTON/SINGAPORE
— Hackers who stole $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank have
been linked to an attack on a bank in the Philippines, in addition to
the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures, cybersecurity company Symantec Corp said
in a blog post.
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has blamed North Korea for the attack on Sony's Hollywood studio.
A
senior executive at Mandiant, the cybersecurity company investigating
the Bank Bangladesh heist, also told Reuters the hackers had recently
penetrated banks in Southeast Asia.
In
the blog post published on Thursday, Symantec did not name the
Philippines bank or say whether any money was stolen, but said the
attacks could be traced back to October last year. It did not identify
the hackers.
The
Philippines central bank's deputy governor, Nestor Espenilla, told
Reuters that no bank in the country had lost money to hackers, although
he did not rule out the possibility of cyber attacks.
"We are checking if there are similar attacks on Philippine banks," Espenilla said. "However, no reported losses so far."
He added: "It is one thing to be attacked. It is another to lose money."
Marshall
Heilman, vice president for Mandiant, a part of U.S.-based FireEye,
said it was not known whether any money was lost in the other attacks he
described or whether the hackers had been successfully blocked.
"There
is a group operating in Southeast Asia that definitely understands the
bank industry and is at more than one location," he said.
Heilman
declined to identify the country or countries, or the institutions
attacked. He said it was the same group as the one involved in the Bank
Bangladesh theft and that the attacks were recent, but declined to be
more specific.
Central
banks elsewhere in Southeast Asia - Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei,
Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and East Timor - have
declined comment or denied knowledge of any other breaches.
There
have been at least four known cyber attacks against a bank involving
fraudulent messages on the SWIFT payments network, one dating back to
2013. SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication, urged banks this week to bolster their security,
saying it was aware of multiple attacks.
Banks around the world use secure SWIFT messages for issuing payment instructions to each other.
"HARD CONNECTION"
SWIFT
said earlier this week that February's Bangladesh Bank hack was a
"watershed event for the banking industry" and that it was "not an
isolated incident."
Spokeswoman
Natasha de Teran said on Thursday that SWIFT was "actively looking into
other possible instances of such fraud," but would not comment on
individual entities.
Symantec
said it had identified three pieces of malware that were used in
limited targeted attacks against financial institutions in Southeast
Asia. (http://symc.ly/1sRNHc7)
One
of the malicious programs has been previously associated with a hacking
group known as Lazarus, which has been linked to the devastating attack
on Sony's Hollywood studio in 2014.
"There
is a pretty hard connection now to the Sony attacks and the actor
behind them" and the Bangladesh heist, Eric Chien, technical director at
Symantec, said in an interview.
Another
cybersecurity firm, BAE Systems, said this month that the distinctive
computer code used to erase the tracks of hackers in the Bangladesh Bank
heist was similar to code used to attack Sony.
Chien
said that if North Korea was responsible for the hacks on banks via the
SWIFT messaging network it would represent the first known episode of a
nation-state stealing money in a cyber attack.
Policymakers,
regulators and financial institutions around the world are stepping up
scrutiny of the cyber security of the SWIFT payments system after
hackers used it to make fraudulent transfers totaling $81 million out of
Bank Bangladesh's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Symantec
and other researchers have also linked the hack to a failed attempt to
use fraudulent SWIFT messages to steal from a commercial bank in
Vietnam.
In
addition, Reuters reported last week that Ecuador's Banco del Austro
had more than $12 million stolen from a Wells Fargo account due to
fraudulent transfers over the SWIFT network.
Bangladesh
police are also reviewing a nearly-forgotten 2013 cyber heist at the
nation's largest commercial bank, Sonali Bank, for connections to the
central bank heist, a senior law enforcement official told Reuters. The
unsolved theft of $250,000 at Sonali Bank also involved fraudulent
transfer requests sent over the SWIFT network.
(Additional
reporting by Narottam Medhora in Bengaluru and Karen Lema in Manila;
Editing by Siddharth Cavale, Leslie Adler and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
Source: The New York Times
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