in 2016 north korean hackers stole $81 million from the central bank of bangladesh by convincing the fed in new york to obey their fake requests to transfer the money. $81 million. not bad for a day s work, right? north korean hackers it turns out also figured out a way to infect the computers of everyone who visited a relatively obscure banking website. the website of the banking regulator for the nation of poland. poland is not a financial hub. this is a random and somewhat technical part of the international banking system. almost nobody s going to go to the website of the polish banking regulator except of course banks. but that was the point. by basically rigging that real website in poland these north korean hackers were able to get their own malware into the computers of banks from all over the world who had visited that website.
convincing the fed in new york to obey their fake requests to transfer the money. $81 million. not bad for a day s work, right? north korean hackers it turns out also figured out a way to infect the computers of everyone who visited a relatively obscure banking website. the website of the banking regulator for the nation of poland. poland is not a financial hub. this is a random and somewhat technical part of the international banking system. almost nobody s going to go to the website of the polish banking regulator except of course banks. but that was the point. by basically rigging that real website in poland these north korean hackers were able to get their own malware into the computers of banks from all over the world who had visited that website. and they ended up stealing from and targeting banks through that scheme in brazil and chile and mexico and estonia and venezuela and american banks too,
banking website. the website of the banking regulator for the nation of poland. poland is not a financial hub. this is a random and somewhat technical part of the international banking system. almost nobody s going to go to the website of the polish banking regulator except of course banks. but that was the point. by basically rigging that real website in poland these north korean hackers were able to get their own malware into the computers of banks from all over the world who had visited that website. and they ended up stealing from and targeting banks through that scheme in brazil and chile and mexico and estonia and venezuela and american banks too, including bank of america. and that s one way to survive crippling international financial sanctions so you can keep building nuclear bombs and keep pouring high-end cognac down the throat of your deer leader. if you re cash poor and there s no legal way for you to get
credibility, with his inability to push back, there will be a meat ax. if you follow comments this weekend of carl levyn and barney frank, their guns are loaded. shotguns are ready. and they are coming after the banks. and i think we have to be careful about that. you can strain the banks too much. you can put them in a position of taking more risk if you don t allow certain kinds of hedging that reduce risk. sore th or they cut back on lending, and that s not good for the economy. and i do disagree with ezra in the sense that of course banks can fail. of course we can have another systematic failure about. you this is not an example of that. this is a modest, modest loss from a group, by the way, that has made billions of profits for this bank over the past several years. which is part of why this problem happened, because this group was allowed to keep going. but isn t aren t they cutting back on lending? no. loans are going up at the moment. the number of loans are going up?