Vietnamese Tien Phong Bank Cuts Off Cyber Heist

The Vietnamese bank blocked an attempted cyber heist that attempted to transfer more than $1 million.

In the last quarter of 2015 the bank identified questionable requests through fraudulent messages on the messaging system Swift. TPBank, however, states that it was successful in capturing the event fast enough to stop the transition of funds by instantly contacting the involved parties.

The assault didn’t have an impact on the Swift system as a whole or on the transaction system shared between the customer and bank. The transfers were created by the implementation of an infrastructure of an outside vendor that engaged with the Swift messaging system, whom TPBank have discontinued working with in order to work with a more secure system.

Although it’s unclear exactly when Swift were made aware of the attempted attack, or whether or not they had warned clients, it is clear that the attack was similar to the malware attack at thee Bangladesh Bank. this previous attack saw hackers attempting to steal almost $1 billion from the Bangladesh bank using the same method they used for TPBank. The majority of orders were stopped in their tracks, however, roughly $81 million was transferred to bank accounts in the Philippines and moved through casinos resulting in the money remaining missing.