How A Printer Lost A Country $81,000,000
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Published 2024-06-26
On the morning of February 7th, 2016, director of Bangladesh Bank Zubair Bin Huda, takes the elevator and gets off on the 10th floor. He walks briskly into the most restricted part of the building, his mind fixated on the problem that has plagued his office for the past couple of days – the printer. This isn’t just any printer: It’s an automated machine hooked up to the bank's software, designed to print transaction reports instantly, automatically, and 24/7.
This printer was a big deal, and the empty tray represented a huge problem. After troubleshooting the issue for two days, the printer finally comes back online! But then, a backlog of more than expected reports started rolling out, and it was soon obvious that something wasn’t right. The New York Federal reserve received instructions to drain their entire account. Panic erupted as employees rushed to stop the transaction, but it was likely too late. – Bangladesh had just lost 1 billion dollars.
All Comments (21)
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A German bank denying a 20 million transaction for a typo is the most German thing ever
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if you bought a HP printer, you also know how it feels losing a billion dollars to a printer. The cartridge prices are ridiculous
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as a printer technician I can hardly believe that they were physically printing every transaction log on one single printer....
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Summary: Q: How A Printer Lost A Country $1,000,000,000? A: Employees opened an email attachment.
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Who the heck opens a zip file thinking it's a job application
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So, Thor from Pirate Software was right! "If the printer makes a weird noise, I shoot it."
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Correct Title: How A Printer Played A Very Small Role In A Country Almost Losing $1,000,000,000
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0:17 If I was the director, my biggest concern wouldn't the printer, but the fact that the staff work completely naked.
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that was a goat level editing and representation. hats off to the team
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Reminds me of a Disrupt or Fern video. 7.2k views is criminally underrated for this quality of production and storytelling. Keep it up!
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As a Bangladeshi Cyber Security researcher I thoroughly enjoyed the video.
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Imagine being so bad at basic parts of hacking you fumble the ball and turn a 1b heist into an 81m dollar heist.
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Who still allowed e-mails with attachments to directly pass through to employee mailboxes in 2015 simply doesn't deserve any better. In our company, not even HTML messages are allowed to pass through to employee accounts. Employees only get plain text e-mails, never anything else. If the mail contains no plain text message, the incoming mail server translates the HMTL text to plain text before forwarding it. If there are attachments, those are stored on an extra server and are then stripped from the mail. Even if hackers manages to hack the incoming mail server, it's outside of the internal network (before the main firewall) and has no access to anything internally. It can only forward messages to the internal mail server (that will drop all mails containing attachments or HMTL immediately without further notice) and it can upload attachments to the attachment server (there is no external interface for downloading attachments). So even if attackers get total control of the incoming mail server, they cannot access attachments from any other mails and if they disable stripping HMTL/attachments, then these mails never go anywhere as the next server in the process chain will just drop them without even trying to process them. There is no way you can hack into our network by using an exploit in HMTL mails or by adding malicious attachments, as none of this ever reaches any employee. Further sending the same (or a very similar) message to multiple employees one by one will immediately cause that message to be blocked as spam for all employees, because this is no normal use case. Either a message is for one specific employee only or it is for a group of them but then it is send to an internal group distribution address (e.g. every team has a team address for that purpose) or it is send to all the related employee at once (multiple TO or CC). Everything else is clearly spear fishing and performed by someone who doesn't even know the group addresses or who has no idea which employees belong to the same team.
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you don't have to figure out that an international bank uses SWIFT you can't assume SWIFT is a state of the art system, it's been running for many decades and could be the archetype of 'this old software banks run'
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Our financial system is a fucking joke. Any 5 year old could point the flaws in this pathetic "system". A fucking weekend is enough for banks to not be able to communicate? Are you fucking kidding me?
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I am astounded this video only has 1.6k views, this deserve's at least 100k for how quality it is
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So it actually lost them 81 mil since the other transactions didn't go through.
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Why are the employees naked while gathered around the printer? Something was very strange about this from the outset.
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if THIS is your first video, you know the channel is gonna take off, godspeed Cipher!
