A war of words continued on Tuesday over a $100 million bank heist in downtown Manhattan.
The Bangladesh Central Bank again blamed the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for a lack of security that made it easy for the unidentified hackers to make off with the loot — which it traced as far as a casino in the Philippines, before most of it disappeared.
Some of the cash has been recovered, although the South Asian central bank refused to say how much. Meanwhile, an international manhunt for the cyber thieves continued.
“We kept money with the Federal Reserve Bank and irregularities must be with the people who handle the funds there,” Bangladesh Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith told reporters Tuesday, according to Bloomberg. “It can’t be that they don’t have any responsibility.”
At the New York Fed, headed by William Dudley, officials continued to deny that there was a heist or that any hack of its system had occurred. The bank appeared to attribute any possible blame to SWIFT, a money-transfer system, for not catching the thieves first.
“The payment instructions in question were fully authenticated by the SWIFT messaging system in accordance with standard authentication protocols,” Andrea Priest, a New York Fed spokeswoman, said in a statement.
Last year, Kaspersky Labs, a cybersecurity company, released a report accusing how an international hacking cabal of exploiting SWIFT as part of a complex scheme to rob 100 banks of as much as $1 billion.
It isn’t clear why the New York Fed accepted a hacked payment request. Dudley’s bank typically uses a proprietary software system with foreign central banks for transactions, though it will rely on the transfer system, as well as phone calls and emails, to approve transactions in real time, two sources told The Post.
When asked if the New York Fed has an additional layer of cybersecurity to protect against potentially fraudulent SWIFT messages, Priest said, “I don’t know.”