Tag Archives: hacking central banks

How Russia Invaded Microsoft

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Microsoft  said in March 2024 a Russian state-sponsored hacking group that stole information from its senior leadership team is still using that information to gain unauthorized access to its internal systems. The technology company disclosed in January  2024 that the group, which it has identified as Midnight Blizzard, had extracted information from a small percentage of employee email accounts, including members of its senior leadership team and employees in its cybersecurity and legal teams. Since that disclosure, the group has used that information to gain access to Microsoft’s source code repositories and internal systems. The volume of some aspects of the attack, including password sprays, jumped 10-fold in February compared with the already large volume Microsoft encountered in January, it said.

“Midnight Blizzard’s ongoing attack is characterized by a sustained, significant commitment of the threat actor’s resources, coordination, and focus,” Microsoft said. The company said that its investigations of Midnight Blizzard activities are continuing and that it is coordinating efforts with federal law enforcement. In a blog post last August 2023, Microsoft said it had detected Midnight Blizzard, previously known as Nobelium, launching targeted social-engineering attacks that used Microsoft Teams chats to phish for credentials. The former Nobelium group has been linked by U.S. authorities to the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation and is known for its involvement in the massive SolarWinds hack of 2020.

Excerpts from Dean Seal, Microsoft Says Russian-Sponsored Hackers Still Using Stolen Information, WSJ, Mar. 9, 2024

Stealing from Central Banks: hacking attacks

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A little-noticed lawsuit details a hacking attack similar to one that stole $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank, saying cybercriminals stole about $9 million in 2015 from a bank in Ecuador…..…A third attack, from December 2015 at a commercial bank in Vietnam, was detailed last week by the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, or Swift. That bank detected the fraudulent requests and stopped the movement of funds, the central bank in Vietnam said.  In the January 2015 Ecuador hack, as with the Bangladesh case, hackers managed to get the bank’s codes for using Swift, the global bank messaging service, to procure funds from another bank, according to court papers.

The Ecuadorean bank, Banco del Austro, filed a lawsuit in New York federal court in 2016 accusing Wells Fargo & Co. of failing to notice “red flags’’ in a dozen January 2015 transactions and to stop them before the thieves transferred about $12 million, most of it to banks in Hong Kong.  Lawyers for the two banks didn’t immediately return phone calls asking to comment about the case and Swift’s complaints that they had failed to notify the messaging network….

There are similarities in method, including thieves accessing the bank’s system to log on to the Swift network through customer sites, and doing so after bankers’ hours, apparently to reduce the likelihood someone would ask questions about specific transactions…

According to that filing on behalf of Banco del Austro, or BDA, “For each of the unauthorized transfers, an unauthorized user, using the Internet, hacked into BDA’s computer system after hours using malware that allowed remote access, logged onto the Swift network purporting to be BDA, and redirected transactions to new beneficiaries with new amounts.” Using that method, just before midnight on Jan. 14, 2015, a payment order made to a Miami company for less than $3,000 was altered to send $1.4 million to an account in Hong Kong, according to the court filing. There were 12 suspect transfers carried out over a 10-day period in January 2015, according to the lawsuit.  BDA’s lawsuit argues Wells Fargo should have noticed several anomalies in the transfers and, at a minimum, asked questions about them.  “The unauthorized transfers were made in unusual times of the day, in unusual amounts, to unusual beneficiaries in unusual geographic locations,’’ the bank’s lawyers argued in the filing. “Despite the numerous anomalies in the unauthorized transfers, [Wells Fargo] inexplicably failed to block them and/or alert BDA of the suspicious activity.’’

Excerpts from DEVLIN BARRETT and KATY BURNE, Now It’s Three: Ecuador Bank Hacked via Swift, Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2016