BRASILIA - Twelve people including 6 hostages were killed on Friday in a shootout between police and bank robbers attempting to blow up ATMs at 2 banks in a small town in northeastern Brazil, authorities said.
Six hostages, among them 2 children, died in the shooting, local media reported, when police opened fire on the robbers at bank branches on the main street in Milagres in the interior of Ceará state.
"Six of the bandits died. We are working to identify the victims," Kelia Jacome, spokeswoman for the governor said by telephone.
She said the attempted night-time robbery was interrupted by a police unit that had been tracking a gang responsible for similar bank robberies in the area, in which explosives were used to blow apart automatic teller machines.
The G1 news website, quoting Milagres Mayor Lielson Landim, reported that 5 of the dead hostages belonged to the same family. Their car had been hijacked by the armed gang that took them as hostages.
Two suspects were arrested by police, who were searching for other gang members with the help of a helicopter, the governor's office said in a statement.
source: news.abs-cbn.com
MUMBAI - Cyber criminals hacked the systems of India's Cosmos Bank and siphoned off nearly 944 million rupees ($13.5 million) through simultaneous withdrawals across 28 countries over the weekend, the bank has told police.
The co-operative bank said unidentified hackers stole customer information through a malware attack on its automated teller machine (ATM) server, withdrawing 805 million rupees in 14,849 transactions in just over two hours on Aug. 11, mainly overseas.
Apart from the ATM withdrawals, the hackers transferred 139 million rupees to a Hong Kong-based company's account by issuing three unauthorised transactions over the SWIFT global payments network, the bank said in a police complaint, a copy of which was seen by Reuters.
SWIFT, whose messaging system is used to transfer trillions of dollars a day, said it did not comment on individual cases.
Cosmos Bank, based in the western city of Pune, said in a press statement that its main banking software receives debit card payment requests via a "switching system" but it was bypassed in the attack.
"During the malware attack, a proxy switch was created and all the fraudulent payment approvals were passed by the proxy switching system," the bank said.
The bank declined to reveal the countries, citing security risks.
Police said they were investigating the theft.
A police official, who declined to be named, said they had enlisted the help of experts to find out how authorised transactions were conducted simultaneously in various countries.
India's City Union Bank Ltd reported in February that it had suffered three "fraudulent remittances" of nearly $2 million that had been pushed through the SWIFT financial platform.
In 2016, unknown hackers stole more than $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank's account with the Federal Reserve Bank Of New York. Investigators have made little progress in the case.
"While there is growing awareness to regularly update an organisation's cyber preparedness and defence mechanisms, a large number of institutions wake up to this reality only post an incident which often leads to a loss of reputation and/or financial misappropriation," said Nikhil Bedi, a partner with Deloitte India.
($1 = 69.8950 Indian rupees) (Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Adrian Croft)
source: news.abs-cbn.com
