IBS Journal April 2016
The month in numbers…
600…The number of staff to be axed by Norway’s DNB. The bank is also shuttering more than half of its branches, saying that almost all its customers now prefer to use its digital channels. DNB has already shed 200 branch staff after seeing over-the- counter services decline by 82% in the last two years.
300,000…Jiffy, the real-time mobile P2P payments service developed by SIA, has surpassed 300,000 registered users. The average value of a single transaction is €44 and around 50% are for sums under €25.
At present, Jiffy is available to current ac- count customers at BNL, Banca Popolare di Milano, Cariparma, Carispezia, Che Banca!, Friuladria, Gruppo Carige, Hello bank!, Intesa Sanpaolo, Banca Mediolanum, Mon- te dei Paschi di Siena, Banca Popolare di Vicenza, UBI Banca, UniCredit, Webank and Widiba. It will soon also be live at Banca Popolare di Sondrio, Cassa Centrale Banca, Gruppo Poste Italiane, Raiffeisen, Veneto Banca and Volksbank Banca Popolare. At this point, the service will be accessible by over 32 million Italian current accounts (around 80% of the total).
$100 million…The head of Bangladesh’s central bank, Atiur Rahman, has quit after
hackers stole around $100 million from the country’s foreign currency reserves. Bangladeshi Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith had earlier branded the bank’s approach to the cyber theft “very incompetent.”
The crooks took the money last month from the bank’s account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. They used stolen credentials to make requests to transfer cash look legitimate. If all these had gone unchallenged, the gang would have got away with about $1 billion. However, the volume of requests and a spelling mistake in the name of one recipient of funds lead to the transfers being stopped. The $100 million was transferred to casinos in the Philippines. The central bank says that it has so far recovered $20 million.
$25.7 million…A new form of malware has been sucking Russian banks dry over the past six months, draining as much as $25.7 million by infecting the victims’ IT networks. The “Buhtrap” malware group, which has been tracked by Group IB, delivers its deadly payload via a phishing email that pretends to have come from the Central Bank of Russia. Once opened the contents pour into the victim’s network, where only a complete infrastructure shut
© IBS Intelligence 2016
down can stop it.
Group IB says that the worm has made 13 successful attacks on Russian banks, causing customers delays and losses as recovery operations try to track it down. What’s more, it is now available in the form of off-the-shelf kits after its source code was posted on hacking forums in February. “This group’s activity has led to the current situation where attacks against Russian banks causing direct losses in the hundreds of millions of rubles are no longer taken as something unusual,” says Group IB.
All of the incidents could have been “easily prevented”, it adds. The banks’ reliance on basic anti-virus security systems has made them easy targets for hackers. “Annual expenditures for effective prevention tools are 28 times lower than the average direct loss from one targeted attack,” says Group IB.
The Buhtrap group originally operated by distributing software that had been modified to compromise machines. It appears it has now geared itself towards direct attacks.
Scott Thompson and Alex Hamilton
www.ibsintelligence.com 15
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