Bangladesh Bank heist
The 2016 theft in which forged SWIFT messages tried to move nearly a billion dollars out of Bangladesh's central bank, and 81 million actually vanished.
The attackers had been inside the central bank's network for months. Overnight into Friday 5 February 2016 they sent 35 payment orders to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which held Bangladesh Bank's dollar account. Malware tampered with the SWIFT Alliance Access software and with the printer that should have produced the confirmations. The timing was careful: weekend in Dhaka, weekend in New York, then Chinese New Year in the Philippines.
Four orders, 81 million dollars, landed in accounts at the Philippine bank RCBC and were laundered through casinos. A fifth, 20 million to Sri Lanka, was caught and reversed over a typo — fandation instead of foundation — and New York held the other thirty. The FBI attributed the operation to North Korea's Lazarus group. SWIFT responded with its Customer Security Programme, the first time it set requirements for the banks' own terminals.