The chief executive officer of Swift, the interbank messaging system embroiled in a global bank-hacking controversy, says to expect more information about breaches to emerge as fully armoring the network's defenses is likely to take years.

"We don't think this is going to be solved overnight, so we'll be looking for a number of quick wins to improve things in the near term," Gottfried Leibbrandt, Swift's CEO, said in an interview from the cooperative's London office on Wednesday. "The full rollout, and the full shore up, will be a matter of years."

Hackers used Swift messages to steal $81 million from Bangladesh's central bank in February, and since then investigators are said to have identified breaches at as many as 12 other banks. Swift's boss talked directly to the media about the attacks for the first time, as the crisis has pushed the little known Belgium-based operation into the center of an investigation into one of the largest cyberheists in history.