DHAKA/NEW YORK – Jupiter. That single word, by a stroke of luck, helped stop the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from paying nearly $1bn to the cyber-criminals behind a notorious bank heist earlier this year, according to sources familiar with the incident.When hackers broke into the computers of Bangladesh’s central bank in February and sent fake payment orders, the Fed was tricked into paying out $101m. But the losses could have been much higher had the name Jupiter not formed part of the address of a Philippines bank where the hackers sought to send hundreds of millions of dollars more. By chance, Jupiter was also the name of an oil tanker and a shipping company under US sanctions against Iran. That sanctions listing triggered concerns at the New York Fed and spurred it to scrutinise the fake payment orders more closely, a Reuters examination of the incident has found.It was a "total fluke" that the New York Fed did not pay out the $951m requested by the hackers, said a person f...
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