Bangladesh heist could have been prevented

ON May 15, 2015, three bank accounts were opened at the Rizal Commercial Banking Corporation (RCBC) in the Philippines. Each of these accounts was to lie dormant until Feb 4 the following year. The authorities were to find out only later that the accounts were fake, and linked to an attempt by the cyber criminals to steal nearly US$1 billion from the Bangladesh Central Bank.

The heist had been in the planning for nearly a year, but thanks in large part to a spelling error that raised alarm bells, the attackers made off with only US$81 million.

To understand how this …