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How Penetrable Is SWIFT?

Successful hack is a story of globalization and poverty—and an illustration of why the global financial system is only as strong as its weakest link.

By Leonid Bershidsky, Bloomberg | Updated on April 26, 2016

SWIFT, the financial messaging system used by 11,000 banks throughout the world, admitted this week that it’s vulnerable to hackers if they penetrate its member financial institutions. It shouldn’t be major news: Thieves go where the money is, and more than half of the 25.8 million messages a day that the network carried in March were meant to transfer money. Yet SWIFT’s hacker problem is a great illustration of how globalized finance can get out of hand.

SWIFT’s warning, sent to members over its secure network, tells them about “a number of recent cyber incidents in which malicious insiders or external attackers have managed to submit SWIFT messages from financial institutions’ back offices, PCs, or workstations connected to their local interface to the SWIFT network.” Of these incidents, only one is well-known—February’s Bangladesh Bank heist, which could easily provide the plot for a cyberpunk novel. On Monday, U.K.-based BAE Systems’ cybersecurity division provided the technical details of how the hack probably worked, having found malware that was likely used for the hack on an online malware repository.

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