SWIFT Attacks Require Swift Investigations

2017-01-06 Checkpoint

https://blog.checkpoint.com/research/swift-attacks-require-swift-investigations/

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The excerpt examines fraudulent SWIFT transfer activity against banking environments, including the Bangladesh central bank loss, and notes public suggestions connecting the attacks to high-yield actors such as Carbanak and the Sony hackers without making a firm attribution. Check Point researchers recreated a compromised SWIFT-like environment and ran malware reportedly used to hide fraudulent transfers, showing tampering with transaction records and attempts to make attacker-initiated transfers appear legitimate. The activity relied heavily on tools already present in the victim environment, including cmd.exe, sqlplus.exe, database access as sysdba, and interaction with the SWIFT process. The malware also accessed and paused a specific printer, apparently to suppress local evidence of transactions, underscoring the attackers' detailed knowledge of the target's banking workflow.

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