The $850 Million Keystroke: A Typo That Saved a City
Discover how a single misspelled word in a fraudulent bank transfer saved an entire capital city from an unprecedented economic collapse.
The Billion-Dollar Blind Spot
What most people don’t realize about the largest digital bank heist in history is that it was stopped by a single misspelled word. Imagine planning the perfect crime. You bypass the most secure firewalls on earth. You manipulate global time zones to your advantage. You even deploy custom malware to disable the physical receipt printers in a central bank to hide your tracks. You are moments away from stealing nearly a billion dollars and crippling an entire capital city’s economy. Then, you hit the wrong key on your keyboard.
In February 2016, a highly organized group of hackers infiltrated the computer network of the Bangladesh Bank in Dhaka. Their target was the nation’s foreign exchange reserves, which were held securely at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The operation was timed with terrifying precision.
The attackers struck on a Thursday evening. Friday is a standard weekend day in Bangladesh. By the time the bank staff returned on Sunday, the Federal Reserve in New York would be closed for its own weekend. This gave the