Bangladesh central bank governor Atiur Rahman has resigned after unidentified hackers took $101 million out of the bank's Federal Reserve Bank of New York account.
While the heist happened last month in February, Rahman neglected to inform the government of it.
The resignation is hot on the heels of when Bangladeshi Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith referred to how the bank handled the cybercrime as "very incompetent."
"He [Rahman] called me yesterday, and I've asked him to resign. And he has resigned today," Muhith told the Agence France-Presse.
Moreover, Rahman told Reuters that Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina approved his resignation.
"I resigned and the prime minister accepted it," Rahman told Reuters.
The hackers were able to gain access to the Bangladesh Bank's computer systems, transferring $81 million from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to casinos in the Philippines from Feb. 4 to 5.
If it were not for a typo and the sheer amount of requests that caused other transactions to be put to a halt, the people behind the crime would have stolen about $1 billion scot-free.
Needless to say, officials in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Philippines were up and about to recover the money. According to Bloomberg, the central bank retrieved $20 million out of the $101 million total, saying that $81 million is outstanding. Most of the stolen funds were found in the Philippines, where they were laundered.
On an interesting note, Rahman was about to retire when he turns 65 in August, after seven years of service for the central bank.
As previously mentioned, the government of Bangladesh is publicly blaming the Federal Reserve Bank of New York for not catching the suspicious transactions sooner.
However, the majority of cyber security experts says that Bangladesh should look at itself rather than pointing the finger at someone else over the whole fiasco.
"It is interesting that the Bangladeshi government came and finger wagged at the Fed to deflect attention from their own bank," Tobias Feakin, the director of the national security program at ASPI, says.
Banks and businesses across the globe are keen on learning more about the incident so that they'll be able to see whether or not they are affected by a similar cyberattack.
