SWIFT urges banks to take fitting measures

Global banking cooperative SWIFT has advised its user-banks in Bangladesh to employ appropriate security measures to eliminate risk exposure to malicious software in the wake of the attack on the central bank's reserves.

“SWIFT strongly recommends that in line with best practice users deploy appropriate safeguards and install patches to their systems where necessary to reduce risk exposure to malware,” wrote Gottfried Leibbrandt, chief executive officer of SWIFT, in a letter.

The letter was sent to all user-banks in the country on March 20.

Headquartered in Belgium, SWIFT is a member-owned cooperative that provides international codes to facilitate payments between banks globally.

After harvesting credentials for 10 days, on February 4 around midnight, hackers broke into the BB's SWIFT servers and generated 35 payment orders for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, stealing $101 million.

Leibbrandt insisted that SWIFT's core messaging services were not impacted by the issue and those continue to work normally.

“There is no indication that our network has been compromised,” he said.

He also said the company had been supporting the central bank of Bangladesh to help it resolve its underlying operational issues and has also been in contact with the Fed on the matter.

Leibbrandt added that SWIFT takes its security seriously and was vigilant and actively assessed risks to its users, services and systems.

“However, customers remain responsible for the setup, maintenance and monitoring of their own internal network setup and security,” he said.

The BB asked SWIFT Global to review its system in Bangladesh as soon as it found out about the security breach on February 7.

But SWIFT Global said it was not possible to provide on-site support at that moment, recommending off-site support instead.

Finally, on March 17, two engineers -- one from SWIFT's office in Hong Kong and the other from Kuala Lumpur -- arrived in Bangladesh.

A BB official yesterday told The Daily Star that the two engineers examined the BB's SWIFT operation. They had already left Bangladesh.