Hackers who tried to steal nearly $2 million from India’s City Union Bank this month used tactics similar to those employed in the unsolved cyber heist of $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank in 2016, City’s CEO said on Monday.
The unknown hackers disabled the City printer connected to global payments platform SWIFT on Feb. 6, preventing the bank from receiving acknowledgement messages for three fraudulent payment instruction sent that evening until the next morning.
“Nobody suspected that it was an attack and thought it was a systemic network failure,” N. Kamakodi told Reuters by phone. “The system department people, everybody assembled, analyzed the problem, rebooted, they closed shop only around 10-10.30 in the night.”
The next morning, bank officials managed to reconcile the previous day’s transactions and found out “three transactions which were not originated from our bank”.
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