Exclusive: SWIFT bank network says aware of multiple cyber fraud incidents

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Thomson ReutersSwift code bank logo is displayed on an iPhone 6s on top of Euro banknotes in this picture illustration made in Zenica

By Jim Finkle

(Reuters) - SWIFT, the global financial network that banks use to transfer billions of dollars every day, warned its customers on Monday that it was aware of "a number of recent cyber incidents" where attackers had sent fraudulent messages over its system.

The disclosure came as law enforcement authorities in Bangladesh and elsewhere continued to investigate the February cyber theft of $81 million from a Bangladesh Bank account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank. SWIFT has acknowledged that the scheme involved altering SWIFT software on the bank's computers to hide evidence of fraudulent transfers.

"SWIFT is aware of a number of recent cyber incidents in which malicious insiders or external attackers have managed to submit SWIFT messages from financial institutions' back-offices, PCs or workstations connected to their local interface to the SWIFT network," the group warned customers on Monday in a notice seen by Reuters.

The warning, which SWIFT issued in a confidential alert sent over its network on Monday, did not name any victims or disclose the value of any losses from the previously undisclosed attacks. SWIFT confirmed to Reuters the authenticity of the notice.

Also on Monday, SWIFT released a security update to the software that banks use to access its network.

SWIFT issued that update to thwart malware that security researchers with British defense contractor BAE Systems said was probably used by hackers in the Bangladesh Bank heist.[L2N17S0RG]

BAE's evidence suggested that hackers manipulated SWIFT's Alliance Access server software, which banks use to interface with SWIFT's messaging platform, to cover their tracks.

BAE said it could not explain how the fraudulent orders were created and pushed through the system.

But SWIFT provided some evidence about how that happened in its note to customers, saying that in most cases the modus operandi was similar.

It said the attackers obtained valid credentials for operators authorized to create and approve SWIFT messages, then submitted fraudulent messages by impersonating those people.

SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank FinancialTelecommunication, is a cooperative owned by 3,000 financial institutions. Its messaging platform is used by 11,000 banks and

other institutions around the world and is considered a linchpin of the global financial system.

SWIFT spokeswoman Natasha Deteran told Reuters that the commonality in these cases was that internal or external attackers compromised the banks’ own environments to obtain valid operator credentials.

"Customers should do their utmost to protect against this," she said in an email to Reuters.

SWIFT told customers that the security update must be installed by May 12.

"We have made the Alliance interface software update mandatory as it is designed to help banks identify situations in which attackers have attempted to hide their traces - whether these actions have been executed manually or through malware," she said.

(Reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston; Additional reporting by Serajul Quadir in Dhaka; Editing by Jonathan Weber, Martin Howell and Peter Cooney)

Read the original article on Reuters. Copyright 2016. Follow Reuters on Twitter.

BP CEO: The oil market will 'balance by the end of the year'

• Oscar Williams-Grut
 
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GettyBP CEO Bob Dudley.

A pick-up in demand for oil and "weak supply growth" means BP CEO Bob Dudley is confident that balance between supply and demand will be restored in the oil market by the end of the year, boosting the price.

Dudley says in BP's first quarter results statement on Tuesday:"Market fundamentals continue to suggest that the combination of robust demand and weak supply growth will move global oil markets closer into balance by the end of the year."

While major players like Saudi Arabia are refusing to freeze production and Iran's significant oil supplies have only recently come onto the market, falling investment in new wells means that over the medium to longer term supply is likely to be constrained. The US oil rig count, for example, has dropped off a cliff since mid-2015 as cheap oil strangles the nascent shale oil industry there.

There are signs that the oil price could have already hit the bottom too. BP points out that oil prices averaged $34 (£23.45) a barrel in the first quarter of 2016, down from $54 (£37.25) a barrel in the first quarter of 2015, but are currently averaging $40 (£27.59) a barrel in the second quarter. That looks like progress.

Dudley's prediction that oil will be back on an even keel by the end of the year came as BP announced a set of first quarter numbers that showed improvement in the bombed out business. Here are the key figures:

• $583 million (£402 million) loss, better than the $3.3 billion (£2.2 billion) loss posted in the fourth quarter but down from the $2.6 billion (£1.8 billion) profit in the first quarter of last year;
• Unchanged quarterly dividend of 10 cents a share;
• Underlying cash flow of $3 billion (£2 billion);
• $1.1 billion (£760 million) of payments relating to Gulf of Mexico spill, including $530 million (£365.6 million) related to the 2012 criminal settlement;
• Capital expenditure of $3.9 billion (£2.7 billion), down from $4.4 billion (£3 billion) in the first quarter of last year.

In short, BP is stemming its losses by slashing costs. The oil giant announced at the start of the year it is cutting a huge 7,000 jobs to enable it to better weather the oil price storm.

Despite the steep plunge in BP's earnings on the same quarter last year, the figure still beat analysts estimates.

The company points out in today's results that cash costs in 2015 were $4.6 billion (£3.1 billion) lower than in 2014 and expected costs to be a full $7 billion (£4.8 billion) lower than 2014's levels by 2017.

Dudley, who suffered a humiliating pay rebellion earlier this month, says in today's results: "Despite the challenging environment, we are driving towards our near-term goal of rebalancing BP's cash flows. Operational performance is strong and our work to reset costs has considerable momentum and is delivering results. Furthermore, development of our next wave of material upstream projects is well on track."

Brian Gilvary, BP's CFO, says in the statement: "As we steadily take out more costs, the point at which we expect to be able to rebalance 2017 organic sources and uses of cash continues to move lower; we currently anticipate being able to achieve this at oil prices in the range $50-55 a barrel.

"This progress underpins our commitment to sustaining BP's dividend as the first priority within our financial frame. Should prices remain low, we have the flexibility to adjust further within the financial framework."

BP shares are up just over 3% in London after over half an hour of trade.Investing.com

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This résumé for Elon Musk proves you never, ever need to use more than one page

• Julie Bort
 
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• Apr. 17, 2016, 1:12 PM
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AP Photo/Jack PlunkettElon Musk.

Let's say you are Elon Musk, one of the most influential entrepreneurs in tech history whose career spans two decades of successful startups.

Let's say your accomplishments range from creating an electronic-payments industry and invigorating the solar-energy market to inventing high-performance electric cars and launching a commercial space and rocket industry.

All of that would surely need a couple of pages to explain on a résumé, right?

Not at all, say the experts at online résumé-writing firm Novorésumé, who believe in the less-is-more concept for writing résumés.

They created a sample résumé for Musk to prove "even a highly successful career like his can be presented in a one page résumé," cofounder Andrei Kurtuy tells Business Insider.

Now there's a few tongue-in-cheek elements to this résumé that you wouldn't want to copy for your own résumé. For instance, in a list of "Skills and competencies," one of his skills is "micromanaging."

Musk is famous for his high standards, and he has a reputation for being a rough guy to work for. He once described himself as a "nano-manager," a play on words meaning he's even more controlling than a micromanager. ("I have OCD on product-related issues. I only see what's wrong. I never see what's right. It's not a recipe for happiness," was how he explained his management style).

This résumé also includes a four-level rating system in which some of the skills listed are not rated at a full four bars. You might want to reconsider that idea before adopting it.

Still, it proves that with the right design, you never, ever, need more than one page for a résumé.

NovorésuméThis résumé for Elon Musk proves you never need more than one page.

A self-made billionaire says a lesson he learned from his parents has made all the difference with his money

• Kathleen Elkins
 
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• Apr. 19, 2016, 2:06 PM
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Courtesy of Anthony HsiehAnthony Hsieh.

Right out of college, Anthony Hsieh was asking the same question most 20-somethings ask: "What do I do with my life now?" he tells Business Insider.

He stumbled upon the mortgage industry by mistake, but it didn't take long before he became a major player in the field. At age 25, he purchased the mortgage brokerage company he was working for with his own savings and a loan from his uncle — a decade later, he closed a deal with E-Trade to create E-Trade Mortgage.

Today, the self-made billionaire is the CEO and chairman of nonbank consumer mortgage lender loanDepot, which he launched in 2010.

He credits much of his entrepreneurial success to a lesson his parents instilled in him from a young age, after leaving Taiwan, where he was born, for the US: Always live within your means.

"Growing up as an immigrant, you watch your parents make tremendous sacrifices because they're uprooting their family and all of the comfort by moving to a foreign land," Hsieh tells Business Insider.

"You see sacrifice and hard work, and it's always been installed in us kids to live within your means and not get into a situation where you can't keep up with your expenses."

While an invaluable personal finance lesson for anyone to grasp, Hsieh applied it on a larger scale — with each of the companies he's founded, he's made it a point to spend consciously and diligently.

Learning to live within your means "has helped me quite a bit and that's one of the reasons I've survived and flourished in consumer lending for 30 years," he explains. "My career spans four different economic and housing cycles and I'm still sitting at the table as a key executive in consumer lending. I think part of that is my discipline of making certain that the company and myself don't overspend."

Hsieh isn't the only billionaire who keeps his spending in check. Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, and many other wealthy people choose to live frugally.

Bill Gates is pushing a new clean energy — and it's not solar or wind

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Vincent Kessler/Reuters

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Bill Gates is looking for an energy miracle.

Clean energy may still be in its early stages, but Gates sees a lot of different paths to getting us there other than solar and wind energy.

One solution the wealthiest human alive is particularly keen on: nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is essentially the process of splitting two atoms to create electricity.

In a Q&A with MIT Technology Review, Gates talked about his involvement with private nuclear fission company TerraPower. Gates serves as chairman of the company alongside vice chairman Nathan Myhrvold, former Microsoft chief technology officer.

In the interview, Gates said TerraPower's pilot plant will be built in China with a slated completion date of 2024. That arrival date would mean "sometime in the 2030s you’d have a design that you’d hope all new nuclear builds would adopt, because the economics, safety, waste, and all the key parameters are dramatically improved," Gates said in the interview.

TerraPower is creating a traveling wave reactor to get nuclear fission on the clean energy map. The big upside of the traveling wave reactor is it converts depleted uranium, a byproduct of the nuclear fission process, into usable fuel. 

But Gates notes that TerraPower isn't the only possibility to pushing nuclear fission forward.

"There are countries like India, Korea, Japan, France, and the U.S. that have done advanced nuclear stuff, but today about half of all the nuclear plants being built in the world are being built in China, and China’s ability to do engineering is very impressive," he said.

In an interview with Tech Insider's Drake Baer, Gates said that for nuclear fission to really become a reality it will need to be "cheap enough and safe enough that people broadly embrace it," but once that happens he thinks it could be "scaled up."

Either way, for anything to get done there needs to channel more funding on the research and development of clean energy solutions from wind to solar to nuclear fission.

"You know, it’s possible there’s some guy in a laboratory today who’s inventing something miraculous, but because of climate change and the value of having cheaper energy, we shouldn’t just sit around and hope for his miracle," Gates said in the MIT Review interview. "We should tilt the odds in our favor by doubling the R&D budget."

SEE ALSO: THE BILL GATES INTERVIEW: An energy miracle is coming, and it's going to change the world

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Goldman Sachs is launching a bank account for ordinary people — not just the super rich

• Oscar Williams-Grut
 
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REUTERS/Gary CameronGoldman Sachs chairman and CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

Goldman Sachs is getting in on the online-only bank action, offering a digital savings account at a rate of 1.05%. And you can open it with a deposit from as little as $1.

That means it's no longer just the mega rich who can say they bank with Goldman Sachs.

The new online-only US savings account, on GSBank.com, comes as part of Goldman's acquisition of GE Capital, the Financial Times reports, and is part of efforts by the investment bank to diversify sources of funding.

Banks' earnings are not doing well because of depressed global market activity and growth. Goldman is no different, with the bank's net earnings plummeting by 60% in the first quarter. There's a lot of pressure for investment banks to find alternative revenue sources as trading activity dwindles.

Goldman acquired just under 150,000 retail customers through the GE Capital deal that closed last week, according to the FT. GS Bank has deposits of $98 billion (£67.8 million) and also offers certificate of deposit products.

GSBank.com

The savings account is competitively priced, with US interest rates at a rock-bottom 0.5%. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, Goldman is aping the expansion tactics of its digital-only challenger bank Atom Bank here in the UK with its new savings product.

Atom has launched with a very aggressively priced 2.30% savings account in the UK in a bid to hoover up customers with an attractive introductory rate. The new app-only bank, which is backed by Spain's BBVA, then plans to bolt on additional banking products further down the line.

It will be interesting to see whether GS Bank does as its name suggests and begins offering more retail banking services further down the line.

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German business sentiment came in low

• Ben Moshinsky
 

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REUTERS/Laszlo Balogh

An index tracking Germany's business climate came in at 106.6 for April, below analysts' estimates of 107.1.

The Ifo index came down from 106.7 in March, led by poor retail sales.

The data disappointed but is still an improvement on low figures at the end of last year.

Here's Dr. Clemens Fuest from Ifo:

In both wholesaling and retailing the business climate index fell markedly, but nevertheless remains considerably above the long-term average.

Firms at both levels of trade were less satisfied with both their current situation and their business outlook.

In construction the business climate index turned positive. This was mainly due to far better assessments of the current business situation. Contractors, however, were slightly less optimistic about their business outlook for the months ahead.

And here's the chart:

IFO

Fractured Earth (Video)

Fractured Earth

2015

Fractured Earth is a short but impassioned documentary about the impact of hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") in rural Pennsylvania. Photojournalist Lee Stone sets out to consult with a handful of locals in the towns of Dimock and Towanda, PA, where the fracking industry has wreaked havoc. Through first-hand accounts we learn about the struggles working-class Pennsylvanians have endured at the hands of the natural gas industry since 2008.

Hydraulic fracturing involves drilling into the Earth and penetrating the shale layer by inserting a high-pressure combination of water, sand and chemicals into the ground in order to crack it apart and release natural gas. Accessing these natural gasses is meant to lessen our reliance on foreign oil by providing an affordable domestic resource, but the ultimate cost to locals is revealed to be devastating. Throughout the film average citizens share their tales of polluted water sources and corporate intimidation.

Ray Kemble, a former truck driver for the gas industry, has Stone bear witness to the emptying of his water well. After a few minutes of flushing, the water starts to darken and Stone confirms a significant foul smell emanates from it. It is inarguably undrinkable. Raymond Mayerzack, a local fisherman, points to a massive fish die-out that he believes was caused when a truck carrying fracking-related liquids overturned into an area lake. Several families tell of their dependence on bottled water after their wells were contaminated by methane and shale gas, rendering it undrinkable despite the DEP's insistence to the contrary. And while each of these interview subjects can point to documentation about their pollution and contamination claims, the Department of Environmental Protection and gas industry representatives continue to deny liability.

Doug McLinko, Bradford County Commissioner (Towanda, PA) defends the benefits of natural gas, citing an increase in the local economy from industry-related jobs, yet farmers who initially chose to cooperate with the fracking companies have not seen the financial rewards they were promised.Fractured Earth leaves very little room for a pro-fracking argument, making an incriminating case against the natural gas industry and its proponents.