A typo costs bank hackers nearly $1B

Making a typo in a tweet that then gets retweeted is bad enough, but imagine how dumb these hackers feel. Reuters reports that hackers broke into Bangladesh's central bank in February and started transferring large sums to accounts in the Philippines and Sri Lanka from an account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Unfortunately for the hackers, only four of these transfers, for a total value of about $81 million, went through successfully. Not because the break-in was detected by the Bangladesh Bank or because heavily armed police kicked down the hackers' doors and arrested them all at gunpoint... but because one of the transfers had a typo. Attempting to transfer $20 million to a Sri Lankan non-governmental organization called the Shalika Foundation, the hackers instead attempted a transfer to the Shalika "Fandation." Staff at Deutsche Bank spotted this error and got in contact with the Bangladeshis to ask for clarification. The ruse was discovered and the remaining transfers were canceled.

Reuters writes that the NGO does not in fact appear to exist.

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