Bank of Russia Client Workstation (CBI AWS)

2021: Embezzlement of money as a result of a hacker attack

In mid-December 2021, it became known about the first successful hacker attack on the correspondent account of the Bank of Russia in three years. Cyber attack was carried out by the interbank transfer system of ARM KBR (automated workplace of the Bank of Russia client; through this system, banks make settlements among themselves from corsettes opened by the Central Bank), the Group-IB company said.

According to experts, the attack was allegedly carried out by the hacker group MoneyTaker "after a long lull." The company believes that attackers will not stop there. The name of the bank and the amount of stolen money Group-IB did not disclose. According to her, the attack on the bank took more than six months: it began in June 2020, the final stage started in January 2021.

For the first time in 3 years, hackers stole bank money from his account with the Central Bank of the Russian Federation

According to RBC sources close to the Central Bank, we are talking about the theft of more than 500 million rubles. Sources in the cybersecurity market clarified that the attack was made on a "not very large bank," not from the first hundred of the Central Bank. The representative of Group-IB also told Vedomosti that this was the largest amount withdrawn recently.

In the summer of 2018, MoneyTaker attacked PIR Bank according to a similar scheme, then hackers stole over 58 million rubles. In October 2018, the Central Bank revoked the license from a credit institution.

The head of Group-IB Dmitry Volkov in mid-December 2021 noted that the risk of a repeat of a similar attack is not very high, because due to an increase in the level of cybersecurity in Russian banks, such schemes are unprofitable and risky. Kaspersky Lab's chief expert Sergey Golovanov agreed with him, saying that Russian banks have a large margin of safety.

Bank security officers interviewed by Vedomosti also agree that it is difficult to steal money through a message exchange system with the Central Bank.^[1]

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