Bangladesh bank boss Atiur Rahman quits

The head of Bangladesh's central bank, Atiur
Rahman, has resigned after cyber-thieves stole more
than $100m from the country's foreign currency
reserves.
Mr Rahman submitted his resignation to Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina after it emerged that
unknown hackers had stolen the money from the
bank's account with the Federal Reserve Bank of
New York.
The theft happened in February, but Mr Rahman did
not tell the government.
Finance Minister A M A Muhith said he had learnt
of it from press reports.
According to media reports quoting banking
officials, the gang behind the raid used stolen
credentials to make requests to transfer cash look
legitimate.
If all the requests had gone unchallenged, the gang
would have got away with about $1bn.
However, the transfers were stopped when the
volume of requests raised suspicions at other banks.
Spelling mistake
To commit the attack, the gang spent time studying
the internal processes of Bangladesh's central bank,
so they could convincingly pose as officials when
requesting the transfers.
However, the sheer number of transactions and a
spelling mistake helped alert bank staff to the theft.
The spelling mistake in the name of one recipient of
funds led Deutsche Bank, which was helping to
route the cash, to ask for clarification from the
central bank, which then stopped the transaction.
At about the same time, the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York had alerted the Bangladesh central
bank to a series of suspicious requests to transfer
money. The requests are believed to have been
flagged because they were to private accounts rather
than other banks and because there were so many of
them.
The money that the hackers did steal ended up in
accounts in Sri Lanka and the Philippines.
Part of the money was recovered from Sri Lanka,
but the rest was laundered through casinos in the
Philippines. The central bank said it was working
with authorities there to recover the remaining
amount.
Bangladesh's government has publicly blamed the
New York Fed for not spotting the suspicious
transactions earlier.