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So SWIFT, the backbone of international monetary transfers, doesn't have some sort of automated way to verify that requests are legitimate? It would seem to me

So SWIFT, the backbone of international monetary transfers, doesn't have some sort of automated way to verify that requests are legitimate? It would seem to me that once a request is received, the only secure thing to do would be to send a hash of the request back to a known system belonging to the originator to verify that the request was authorized. If SWIFT security is really as bad as this incident seems to suggest, I'm shocked that more fraudulent transfers don't occur.

trumpd 11y ago
At least in consumer usage, SWIFT transfers are "push", not pull as you may be used to with American ACH. So the concept of verifying a request doesn't make sense. It sort of sounds (from the public information) like the Bangladeshi bank's credentials were compromised and used to make fraudulent transfer requests to the NY Fed. That's not really a problem with SWIFT. Arguably the NY Fed should have flagged the requests as suspicious, but that's probably a best-effort kinda thing.