Dhaka, Bangladesh (BBN) - The central bank of Bangladesh has decided not to sign any fresh deal with the US cyber security firm FireEye for caring out further investigation into the cyber heist that took place in early February.
The decision was taken at a meeting of the central bank board of directors, held at its headquarters in the capital Dhaka on Thursday with Bangladesh Bank (BB) Governor Fazle Kabir in the chair.
The FireEye's Mandiant forensics division had offered 700 hours more with a charge of $ 400 per hour for further investigation into the matter.
"The central bank is not interested to hire the US firm further because of higher cost and lack of specific timeframe for completing its investigation," a director of the BB told BBN in Dhaka.
He also said the firm has already submitted its forensic analysis report to the central bank after completing 750 hours analysis on the cyber heist.
The firm initially indentified that hackers deployed sophisticated malware into SWIFT servers to process and authorize transactions.
Complex malwares have been identified with advanced features of command and control communications, the harvesting of credentials and to securely erase all traces of activity after accomplishing its task, it noted.
The cyber fraud took place on the night of February 4 through sending a total of 35 transfer orders into the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York, where the central bank of Bangladesh maintains a foreign-exchange account.
Nearly $ 20 million of the $ 101 million siphoned off money was recovered from Sri Lanka. The lion’s share of the money landed in the Philippines.
BBN/SSR/AD