Staff Reporter :Hackers would have stolen $1 billion in a digital heist last month involving the Bangladesh Bank (BB) and the New York Federal Reserve if it had not done a crucial spelling mistake.Unknown hackers, however, managed to fly away with $80 million after hacking server of Federal Reserve, making it one of the largest known bank thefts in history.The hackers misspelled the word “foundation” when trying to steal from the Shalika Foundation. They actually wrote “fandation” which then prompted a routing bank, Deutsche Bank, to seek clarification from Bangladesh Central Bank, which halted the transaction, according to BB officials.They said that four requests to transfer a total amount of about $81 million to the Philippines went through. But on the fifth attempt, to transfer $20m to a Sri Lankan non-profit organisation, the hackers misspelled the name of the NGO.The hackers had initially breached BB’s online systems and stole credentials for payment transfers. The cyber criminals then made more that 30 requests to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to transfer money from the BB’s account to entities in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.The attempted transactions were coupled with an unusually high number of payment instructions to private entities which raised suspicions at the New York Fed, which also alerted the Bangladesh Bank, Fed officials said.According to the officials, the transactions that were stopped by the banking institutions totalled $870 million. The hacking had occurred at some point between 4 and 5 February this year when an investigation was launched to find the perpetrators. BB later said it had recovered some of the money and is trying to recover more from the Philippines.Sources said, BB has billions of dollars in an account with the Fed, supposed to be for international settlements.
