North Korea Hacking Spree: Is Blockchain the Solution?

Locked in a punishing sanctions regime, North Korea is throwing caution to the wind and has mounted a series of cyber attacks by taking advantage of outdated financial technology, mainly through the SWIFT network. Such cyber-attacks are likely to continue if international financial systems are not shored up in the near future.
A new threat is looming on the horizon, one that has gone largely unnoticed: the string of attacks on the global bank payment messaging system known as SWIFT. Founded in 1973 in Brussels, the company is responsible for the daily transfer of trillions of dollars between banks. The most recent hacking case saw Turkey’s Akbank exposed to a cyber attack which ended up costing the bank around $4 million. This took place a couple of weeks after the Russian central bank suffered a similar fate, leaving it approximately $31 million poorer. An unnamed Ukrainian bank was also targeted through the same method, with unnamed hackers stealing some $10 million.
Despite the considerable sums involved, the attackers have left only breadcrumbs of information behind. Their most successful – and most widely-documented – money-grabbing scheme has been the misappropriation of $81 million from the central bank of Bangladesh. The group exploited a SWIFT product called Alliance Access, a server software system that links banks with the central messaging system, in order to appropriate the central bank’s financial details.

This post was published at FinancialSense on 02/23/2017.