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A Spelling Mistake Saves 850 Million Dollars: The Bangladesh Bank Heist

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A spelling mistake saves 850 million dollars

Over a long weekend in February 2016, attackers who had been inside Bangladesh Bank's network for months sent transfer instructions worth nearly a billion dollars. Wei Liang reconstructs the sequence from the public investigations and explains the role of a printer, a public holiday and a misspelt word.

  • How the attackers got in and why they waited so long
  • The printer that was quietly disabled so nobody would see the confirmations
  • Why Jupiter the shipping company tripped a sanctions filter
  • Where the 81 million went through Manila casinos
  • What SWIFT changed for every member bank afterwards

A case that is mostly about process, which is exactly the point.

Transcript
Hi, I am Wei Liang Choo and this is Packet Trace, the show that takes one cybercrime case and explains it the way I would to my mum. Today we are in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on a Thursday evening in February 2016. The central bank's staff have gone home for the weekend. Inside their network, someone who has been quietly watching for months starts sending payment instructions to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Thirty five of them, worth almost a billion dollars. Some of that money will end up in casinos in Manila. Most of it will be stopped, partly because of a sanctions filter, and partly because somebody spelled the word foundation wrong. We will walk through the whole timeline, the disabled printer, the public holiday, and what every bank in the world changed afterwards. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Let us trace the packets.
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