UK: Hackers tried to steal hundreds of millions from bank, court told

David Brown reports:

An international gang plotted to steal £229 million from customers’ accounts at a leading bank by hacking into computers, a court was told yesterday.

A security supervisor smuggled two Belgian computer hackers into the London offices of Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation by pretending that they were friends who had arrived for a game of cards. The hackers installed spy software that recorded employees’ names and passwords at the bank’s European headquarters in the heart of the City, Snaresbrook Crown Court was told.

[…]

The scheme was foiled because the hackers failed to fill in one of the fields in the Swift system used to make money transfers.