Tonight I’ve been enjoying Gerard Butler in the movie Den of Thieves which is written, directed, and produced by Christian Gudegast. So far, I’ve enjoyed it but along the way my mind starting wandering a bit….

Up came my phone, and “Federal Reserve Robbery” went into google. Which quickly led to… you guessed it… Cyber Security.

In February of 2016, hackers nearly stole $1 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York account holder – The Central Bank of Bangladesh. While 30 of 35 fraudulent transactions were stopped, $20 million moved to Sri Lanka and another $81 million to the Philippines.

How does this happen – three key points in the theories:

• Help from an insider. While the numbers vary from study to study, somewhere between 50+% of all breaches come from malicious insiders, with half of those motivated by finances. The theory in this case that at least one person on the inside was working with the hackers.
• Malware – In this case “Dridex” may have been used, and is usually spread through email. Its purpose is to find usernames and passwords, and look for key credentials to gain more and more access.
• Time – Study after study indicates that the bad guys are in companies for months before being detected. In this case, the current theory is that the hackers were inside at least a month before the actual attack.

What’s the old saying “with enough time and money we can do anything”.

NOTE: You’ll notice a successful embed of the Den of Thieves video trailer this evening. I found that the Word Press app doesn’t seem to support the same capability as the desktop block editor. Embedding video on my desktop worked perfectly in Chrome.