The hackers breached Bangladesh Bank's systems and stole its credentials for payment transfers.
They then bombarded the Federal Reserve Bank of New York with nearly three dozen requests to move money from the Bangladesh Bank's account there to entities in the Philippines and Sri Lanka.
Four requests to transfer a total of about $81 million to the Philippines went through, but a fifth, for $20 million, to a Sri Lankan non-profit organization was held up because the hackers misspelled the name of the NGO, Shalika Foundation.
This incident once again brings to light the criticality of cyber security for a nation and its economy.
And therefore emphasizes the need to secure the cyberspace with collaboration form the cyber security community across borders.
A need that the soon to be organized information security conference in Colombo, Ground Zero Summit, addresses.
An initiative of the Indian Infosec Consortium, Ground Zero Summit is the largest collaborative platform in Asia for cyber security experts and researchers to address emerging cyber security challenges and demonstrate cutting-edge technologies.
It was an exclusive platform in the region providing opportunities to establish and strengthen relationships between the cyber security community and corporates, PSUs, government and its defense establishments.
This is the second time that the Summit comes to Sri Lanka.
The last Ground Zero Summit in Colombo with 150-200 participants attending was a huge success.
It was a gathering of Sri Lanka’s Infosec community, Govt officials in relevant fields, and some corporates of Sri Lanka.
The conference was followed by trainings at SLIIT, which was attended by a large number of students and cyber security enthusiasts.
This year too, the Summit aims to benefit Sri Lankan Govt agencies, defence personal, academic community and enterprises.
The strong bond that India and Sri Lanka share in areas of politics, culture and business will be furthered in the cyber space with this event.
Positioned as Asia’s foremost information security conference, Ground Zero Summit – 2016, Colombo is an attempt to generate information security awareness and combat cyber threats that both the nations as well as enterprises operating in them are facing.
With the Hon’ble Minister for Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure, Mr. Harin Fernando as Chief Guest, the Summit will see many dignitaries from policymaking bodies and corporates grace the occasion.
H.E. Mr. Y.K. Sinha, the Indian High Commissioner to Sri Lanka will be the Guest of Honour for the event.
Other than keynote addresses by Mr. Lal Dias, CEO, CERT SL-CC and Dr Sankalpa Gamwarige, Director & Head Technology Forum, SLASSCOM there is a panel for corporates.
Moderated by Sujit Christy the Director, Layers-7 Seguro Consultoria, the panel will have though leaders like Mr. Wasantha Perera, Head of Information Security and Compliance, Colombo Stock Exchange, Mr. Channa de Silva, Chief Executive Officer, LankaClear, Ms. Shalini Ratwatte, Corporate Attorney, Microsoft's South East Asia, Mr. Hisham Nazeem, Head of IT GRC & Business Systems, Strategic Group IT, John Keells Holdings PLC and Mr. Dharshana Jayasuriya, Chief Information Officer, Bharti Airtel Lanka.
The highlight of the Summit will be the six enriching technical talks.
From fields of cyber security like understand various crypto systems in our environment, sharing innovative ways to detect flaws in them with specially designed tests and audits, to learning about Darknets and effective ways of breaking anonymity of people on darkness - using interesting audio files or using cross domain on TOR.
Also talks that make you aware of the benefits of how deception technology gives organizations a way to reliably detect targeted attacks in real-time, without false positives, and with far less resources than typical defences employed today.
Or learn how the BIGINT data type in MySQL can lead to SQL Injection attacks.
And finally a talk on Digital Forensics that gives an an insight on the kind of evidence that one can extract from different types of media and the different points to consider when we do a deep dive into digital data.
The second day of the Summit will have two trainings that will benefits the community at large and enhance knowledge of malware, web hacking, vulnerabilities and threats etc that will benefit individuals and organizations as well.
The two days of Ground Zero Summit, organized on the 7-8 of April will be at BMICH and DLC, Colombo respectively.