Thieves made off with a total of about $90 million from Bangladesh’s central bank and a commercial bank in Ecuador. Security standards for banks using the Swift network were dictated in what was an eight-gigabyte handbook but rarely enforced, these people say. The hackers used malicious software to remotely monitor routine activity at the central bank for weeks before they struck. The Bangladesh central bank has said it is trying to determine if any of Swift’s work played a role in the attack. “We are concerned about what happened,” says Stephen Pouru, a risk analyst at Papua New Guinea’s central bank.

Source: Wall Street Journal April 30, 2017 18:00 UTC