Ecuador is the Latest in Series of Hacks Against Banks

When it comes to hacking, people do it for all kinds of reasons. Some do it for fun while others target people and places for money. If you are after money, there is only really one place to target, banks. With the bank of Bangladesh having lost millions, with even more being saved by a spelling mistake, it now appears that this was just the first of many hacks against banks using the SWIFT network as it would now appear a bank in Ecuador has already been hacked.

The report is not the first with hackers using SWIFT credentials to imitate bank employees details in order to transfer money from one place to another. In this case, the $12 million was diverted to accounts located in Dubai, New York, Los Angeles and Hong Kong.

This hack follows all the similar traits from the Bangladesh hack months ago, using malware to bypass local security in the banks before gaining access to the SWIFT messaging network, a system used to communicate financial messages to institutes all over the world. The only reason we know about this hack is because the Ecuador-based bank, Banco del Austro (BDA), has filed a lawsuit against Wells Fargo, a bank based in San Francisco.

BDA claim that Wells Fargo is responsible for not spotting the fraudulent transaction and demands the full amount returned while Wells Fargo responded saying that it “properly processed the wire instructions received via authenticated SWIFT messages”.

With banks and organisations not sharing information about the hacks, the SWIFT network seems to be getting the brunt of it with “authorised” transactions being published illegitimately, resulting in millions lost which may have been protected had someone admitted to their systems being breached earlier.