Obama urged to prioritise cybercrime at G20 summit

In the letter sent to the White House ahead of the September 4-5 summit, Sherrod Brown, a senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, and five other Democratic senators say they want the US president to press leaders from the world’s 20 biggest economies to commit in joint communiques to a “coordinated strategy to combat cybercrime at critical financial institutions.”

The letter, dated Monday, suggests that concern among US lawmakers is growing over the February incident in which hackers breached Bangladesh Bank’s systems and used the SWIFT banking network to request nearly 1 billion dollars from an account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Some of the dozens of orders were filled, with much of the lost 81 million dollars disappearing into Philippines casinos - prompting months of international finger-pointing, an ongoing investigation, and several requests from members of Congress for answers from the Fed and from SWIFT, the secure messaging service that banks use to transfer money around the world. 

“Our financial institutions are connected in order to facilitate global commerce, but cyber criminals - whether independent or state-sponsored - imperil this international system in a way few threats have,” the senators, headed by Gary Peters of Michigan, wrote in the letter to Obama.

“We strongly urge you to work with your counterparts and prioritize this discussion at the G20 leaders level in September,” it said of the summit to be held in Hangzhou, China, adding that “executive leadership circles across the globe” needed to pay more attention to the risks. A senator in the Philippines has said Chinese hackers were likely to have pulled off the Bangladesh Bank heist, citing a network of Chinese people involved in the routing of the stolen funds through Manila. Beijing has dismissed the suggestion. 

Copies of the letter from the US senators were also sent to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen and US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. The other senators signing the letter included Mark Warner and Martin Heinrich.