The U.S. is investigating whether the theft of $81 million from a Bangladesh central bank account at the New York Fed is linked to North Korea because of the similarity of the hack to an earlier breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment, two people familiar with the matter said.

There’s no indication that charges would be filed soon, said one of the people, both of whom asked not to be identified because the matter wasn’t public.

Some cyber-security experts have concluded last year’s theft from the Bangladesh central bank’s account was done with some of the same hacking tools used in the 2014 attack on Sony Pictures, the maker of the movie “The Interview” that poked fun at North Korea Supreme Leader Kim Jong-Un. The Sony hack, linked to North Korea by the FBI, was followed that year by a blackout of North Korea’s internet that a U.S. lawmaker said was retaliation, without saying who was responsible for the outage.

Laura Eimiller, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Los Angeles office, declined to comment.

The hackers stole $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which said instructions to make the payments were authenticated by the SWIFT message system, widely used by financial institutions. The episode highlighted vulnerable links in the payment network underlying the global financial system and spurred calls for improved security measures for central banks.

The investigation of possible North Korean links to the Bangladesh theft was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.

Malware Link

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the National Security Agency, said Tuesday at an Aspen Institute round-table discussion that the Sony attack was correctly attributed to the North Korean government. Private sector cyber-security experts have linked the malware used in the Sony attack to that used in the Bangladesh bank theft, he said.

"If that attribution is true, if that linkage from Sony actors to Bangladeshi bank actors is accurate, that means a nation state is robbing banks," Ledgett said. "That is a big deal in my opinion."

Ledgett added that he thinks that nation states are robbing banks.

Source:
courtesy of BLOOMBERG

by Edvard Pettersson and Tom Schoenberg

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