Foiled Vietnam attack likely a test run for Bangladesh heist

Hanoi

A FOILED hacking attack on a small Vietnamese bank may have been a practice run for a US$81 million cyber assault on Bangladesh's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and points to vulnerabilities in how banks connect to the Swift interbank messaging system.

Vietnam's Tien Phong Commercial Joint Stock Bank, known as TPBank, informed the country's regulators on Monday that it had fended off a fraudulent transfer request late last year for more than one million euros (S$1.55 million). The request came through a third-party service that the bank used to connect to the Swift interbank messaging system, the Hanoi-based lender told the central State Bank of Vietnam. The regulator said it's investigating, though the incident didn't result in any losses.