International financial messaging service SWIFT has told clients to share information on attacks on the system to help prevent hacking, after criminals used SWIFT messages to steal $US81 million ($A112 million) from the Bangladesh central bank.
Reports on Friday also said Wells Fargo, Ecuador's Banco del Austro (BDA) and Citibank, whose managing director, Franchise Risk & Strategy, Yawar Shah, is SWIFT's chairman, did not inform SWIFT of an attack last year in which more than $US12 million was stolen from BDA.
The banks and Shah all declined to comment on why.
Banks use secure SWIFT messages for issuing payment instructions to one another. The network is considered the backbone of international finance, but faith in its security has been rocked by the theft from Bank Bangladesh's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
SWIFT said in a communication to users on Friday that they should "immediately inform SWIFT of any suspected fraudulent use of their institution's SWIFT connectivity or related to SWIFT products and services".
SWIFT spokeswoman Natasha de Teran said banks whose SWIFT systems had been hacked should inform SWIFT. She was unable to say whether banks, such as Wells Fargo, that received messages they later discovered were fraudulent, should inform SWIFT.
SWIFT has a role to play in educating its members about cyberthreats, said Doug Johnson, senior risk adviser at the American Bankers Association, noting there were disparate levels of security across financial institutions globally. The ABA is a powerful lobby group for the US banking industry.
"This is a teachable moment for everybody who uses the SWIFT system to recognise that there is an effort by criminals under way to compromise the end points of companies using that system," Johnson told Reuters after SWIFT communicated to its users on Friday.
SWIFT is especially concerned about the use of malware to access interfaces with the SWIFT network. The Belgium-based co-operative, which is owned by its user banks, said it needed technical information from systems that have been compromised with malware to better understand the risks of attack.
Malware was used in the hacks on Bank Bangladesh in February and in the BDA case in January 2015.
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