Reuters reported that hackers stole more than 2 billion rubles ($31 million) from correspondent accounts at the Russian central bank, the bank said on Friday.
“We can’t say exactly when, but we can say today it was stolen,”Ekaterina Glebova, an official in the central bank’s press office, told The Wall Street Journal.
Central bank official Artyom Sychyov discussed the losses at a briefing, saying that the hackers had attempted a cyberheist of about 5 billion rubles.
Sychyov was commenting on a central bank report released earlier in the day, that told about hackers breaking into accounts there by faking a client's credentials. The bank provided few other details in its lengthy report.
The spokeswoman said Mr. Sychev said that the hackers attempted to steal 5 billion rubles and that the central bank was able to recover some of the money. She said the central bank’s security team had collected information about the attacks and contacted police and security forces.
The theft comes as the International Monetary Fund has been warning that emerging-market economies are increasingly at risk of financial shocks because of breakdowns in correspondent banking relationships.
Fears about attacks on banks have mounted since February when unknown cyber criminals stole $81 million in funds that Bangladesh's central bank had on deposit at the New York Fed. Law enforcement agencies around the globe are hunting for the criminals who stole the money using fraudulent wire-transfer requests sent over the SWIFT bank messaging network.
Bad guys generally get into their target banks with spear-phishing attacks to get credentials so they can penetrate the target network. New-school security awareness training is an effective way to block those attacks.
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