Bank of Muscat and Rakbank victims of cyber heist


Two Gulf banks – Bank of Muscat in Oman and Rakbank in the UAE – were the victims of a brazen global $45m cyber-heist, when hackers accessed the systems of their card-processing companies and used the data to withdraw millions of dollars from cash machines around the world. The highly co-ordinated attack – which involved harvesting pins, erasing withdrawal limits and encoding the magnetic strips on dummy cards – saw so-called casher cells swoop on ATMs in more than 20 countries in just a few hours. A total of nine people – seven in the US and two in Germany – have so far been arrested, but the hackers themselves remain at large.