Cyber criminals

This refers to the news story, ‘Bangladesh officials visit Manila to seek recovery of bank heist money’ (Aug 3). It is amazing that some unknown cyber criminals tried to steal nearly $1 billion from the Bangladesh Bank account between Feb 4 and Feb 5, and succeeded in transferring $81 million to four accounts at Rizal Commercial Banking Corp (RCBC) in Manila. Only an amount of $18 million has been recovered so far. Officials from the Bangladesh Central Bank will be visiting Manila where they will pressure the authorities in the Philippines to find ways to return the $63 million that is still missing. Though, the Bangladeshi officials are alleging that the money was allowed to disappear into the casino industry in the Philippines, yet the investigators say that it was laundered, because of systemic failures at RCBC.

Whatever the case may be, it’s beyond one’s imagination that some hacker can steel such a large amount of money ($81 million) from a central bank in a country so easily! What about the IT and human controls that must have been in place in the Bangladeshi bank to stop such withdrawals? Keeping this incident in view, we in Pakistan should institute requisite checks in our banks so that fraudulent withdrawals are detected at the initial stage and remedial action taken by the concerned authorities.

Air-Cdre (r) Azfar A Khan

Rawalpindi