WASHINGTON/SINGAPORE – Hackers who stole $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank have been linked to an attack on a bank in the Philippines, in addition to the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures, cybersecurity company Symantec Corp said in a blog post.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has blamed North Korea for the attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio.

A senior executive at Mandiant, the cybersecurity company investigating the Bank Bangladesh heist, also told Reuters the hackers had recently penetrated banks in Southeast Asia.

In the blog post published on Thursday, Symantec did not name the Philippines bank or say whether any money was stolen, but said the attacks could be traced back to October last year. It did not identify the hackers.

The Philippines central bank’s deputy governor, Nestor Espenilla, told Reuters that no bank in the country had lost money to hackers, although he did not rule out the possibility of cyber attacks.

“We are checking if there are similar attacks on Philippine banks,” Espenilla said. “However, no reported losses so far.”

He added: “It is one thing to be attacked. It is another to lose money.”

Marshall Heilman, vice president for Mandiant, a part of US-based FireEye, said it was not known whether any money was lost in the other attacks he described or whether the hackers had been successfully blocked.

“There is a group operating in Southeast Asia that definitely understands the bank industry and is at more than one location,” he said.

Heilman declined to identify the country or countries, or the institutions attacked. He said it was the same group as the one involved in the Bank Bangladesh theft and that the attacks were recent, but declined to be more specific.

Central banks elsewhere in Southeast Asia – Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and East Timor – have declined comment or denied knowledge of any other breaches.

There have been at least four known cyber attacks against a bank involving fraudulent messages on the SWIFT payments network, one dating back to 2013. SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, urged banks this week to bolster their security, saying it was aware of multiple attacks.

Banks around the world use secure SWIFT messages for issuing payment instructions to each other.

“HARD CONNECTION”

SWIFT said earlier this week that February’s Bangladesh Bank hack was a “watershed event for the banking industry” and that it was “not an isolated incident.”

Spokeswoman Natasha de Teran said on Thursday that SWIFT was “actively looking into other possible instances of such fraud,” but would not comment on individual entities.

Symantec said it had identified three pieces of malware that were used in limited targeted attacks against financial institutions in Southeast Asia. (http://symc.ly/1sRNHc7)

One of the malicious programs has been previously associated with a hacking group known as Lazarus, which has been linked to the devastating attack on Sony’s Hollywood studio in 2014.

“There is a pretty hard connection now to the Sony attacks and the actor behind them” and the Bangladesh heist, Eric Chien, technical director at Symantec, said in an interview.

Another cybersecurity firm, BAE Systems, said this month that the distinctive computer code used to erase the tracks of hackers in the Bangladesh Bank heist was similar to code used to attack Sony.

Chien said that if North Korea was responsible for the hacks on banks via the SWIFT messaging network it would represent the first known episode of a nation-state stealing money in a cyber attack.

Policymakers, regulators and financial institutions around the world are stepping up scrutiny of the cyber security of the SWIFT payments system after hackers used it to make fraudulent transfers totaling $81 million out of Bank Bangladesh’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Symantec and other researchers have also linked the hack to a failed attempt to use fraudulent SWIFT messages to steal from a commercial bank in Vietnam.

In addition, Reuters reported last week that Ecuador’s Banco del Austro had more than $12 million stolen from a Wells Fargo account due to fraudulent transfers over the SWIFT network.

Bangladesh police are also reviewing a nearly-forgotten 2013 cyber heist at the nation’s largest commercial bank, Sonali Bank, for connections to the central bank heist, a senior law enforcement official told Reuters. The unsolved theft of $250,000 at Sonali Bank also involved fraudulent transfer requests sent over the SWIFT network.

Phnom Penh – Three soldiers from Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen’s elite bodyguard unit were sentenced to one year in prison Friday for beating up two opposition lawmakers, a case a human rights group has called a “blatant cover-up”.

The trio of soldiers turned themselves in days after the incident and admitted to attacking the two opposition MPs, Kong Sakphea and Nhoy Chamreoun, after a parliament session in October.

“The court decides… to sentence (the three defendants) to four years in prison each, but they must serve only one year in jail while the remaining sentence is suspended,” judge Heng Sokna said at Phnom Penh Municipal Court.

The assault, which followed a pro-Hun Sen rally, came as the premier clamps down on a resurgent opposition seeking to end his 31-year monopoly on power.

Although it is a rare case of the premier’s allies facing jail time, critics say the three men have been targeted to clear suspicions that more senior officials were behind the attack.

The soldiers, Chay Sarith, Mao Hoeun and Suth Vanny, have denied receiving any orders from above and said they did not know the two men were lawmakers.

But Human Rights Watch said in a statement Thursday the attack “had all the hallmarks of an operation carried out by Cambodian state security forces”.

“Prosecuting only three people while blocking investigations into the attack’s other planners and participants shows a blatant cover-up by the government and courts,” said Brad Adams, the Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

Rights groups say Hun Sen is using the country’s courts to tie up opposition leaders, whose popularity has grown amid growing disillusionment with the endemic corruption, rights abuses and political repression under his watch.

The premier’s main rival, opposition leader Sam Rainsy, has been forced to live in self-imposed exile abroad to avoid arrest warrants that he says are politically motivated.

His deputy, Kem Sokha, who remains in the country, was charged Thursday with refusing to appear in court for a case related to an alleged sex scandal.

The lawmaker has not been arrested but armed security officers raided his car and the party’s headquarters Thursday, prompting the US Embassy to say it was “deeply concerned”.

It called on the government to refrain from using force and “find a peaceful resolution to the crisis”.

Kathmandu – Rescuers on Friday found the body of one of two Indian climbers missing on Mount Everest, before bad weather forced them to halt search operations, an expedition operator said.

The two men — identified by the Indian embassy as Paresh Nath and Goutam Ghosh — were near the summit of the 8,848-metre (29,029-foot) mountain on Saturday when they lost contact with the rest of their team.

“Rescuers located Paresh Nath’s body around the South Col (mountain pass),” Wangchu Sherpa of Trekking Camp Nepal told AFP.

The cause of Nath’s death has not yet been established.

But the South Col — located at an altitude of 8,000 metres — marks the beginning of the “death zone”, notorious for its difficult terrain and thin air, as low levels of oxygen raise the risk of altitude sickness.

“There is too much wind and snow to continue our search for Goutam Ghosh today,” Sherpa said.

At least 13 killed in Mount Everest’s deadliest avalanche

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

The missing climbers were part of a team of four, one of whom — Subhash Pal — died after falling ill on Sunday. The fourth team member, a woman, was rescued and taken to hospital.

Subhash Pal was the third mountaineer to die on Everest in recent days after an Australian and a Dutch climber succumbed to altitude sickness.

Some 400 people, including more than 150 foreigners, have summited Everest this season after two consecutive years of deadly disasters that led to almost all attempts being abandoned.

Hundreds of climbers fled Everest last year after an earthquake-triggered avalanche at base camp killed 18 people.

Only one climber reached the top in 2014 after an avalanche killed 16 Nepali guides that year.

Despite the risks and recent disasters, Everest’s allure remains undimmed, with Nepal issuing 289 permits to foreigners for this year’s spring climbing season, due to end soon.

Mountaineering is a major revenue-earner for the impoverished Himalayan nation.

The wave of successful summits is expected to give a boost to the climbing industry, left reeling after a string of disasters, including last year’s quake, which killed almost 9,000 nationwide.

Click on thumbnail to view photos. Source: 

AFP, Reuters