Hackers Get Away With $6.7 Million From South African Bank

Hackers continue to plug away and a recent case didn’t involve worms or compromising customer data, but stealing cold hard cash. A group of hackers over a three day period, managed to get away with $6.7 Million from Postbank in South Africa, the nation’s post office service.

One has to wonder how they managed to pull it off over a three day period and why no alarms were made. The group pulled it off over a holiday weekend which is one reason why. Here’s how the attack went down:

“Once the offices were closed for the New Year holidays, the gang put their plan in motion. They accessed the computer from a remote location and used it to break into Postbank’s server system and transfer money from various accounts into the ones they opened.”

“Having also raised the withdrawal limits on those accounts, money mules had no problem withdrawing great amounts of money from ATMs in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State during the next few days, stopping completely when the offices were opened again on January 3.”

Had they had more time, they could have potentially got away with Millions more. While the fraud detection system should have worked, well, it clearly didn’t. Postbank’s fraud detection didn’t work period and was one of the biggest reasons why the hackers got away with all the money.

Upon further investigation, it’s no surprise says a banking security expert considering their network and security systems are very outdated and in a serious need of an upgrade. Thanks to insurance, they will likely get their money back, but it’s not something you want to have happen in the first place.

What would you do if you had Millions of dollars in the bank and some people stole it?