News

Report: World Bank Servers Breached Repeatedly

Story wrong, riddled 'with falsehoods and errors,' bank says

By Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld

October 13, 2008 — CSO —

A number of servers at the World Bank Group were repeatedly breached for more than a year by different intruders but it is not clear how much data might have been compromised in the attacks, Fox News reported Friday.

The story, the details of which were contested by the World Bank after it ran, quotes unnamed sources as saying the banking group was victimized by at least six major intrusions from the Summer of 2007 through September of this year.

At least two of the intrusions appear to have originated from the same batch of IP addresses within China, the report said. The first of the intrusions, from China, was discovered in Sept. 2007 when the FBI apparently informed the bank of the problem which it discovered while it was conducting an unrelated investigation. It apparently allowed the perpetrators to gain full and complete access to a secret data hub maintained by the organization in Johannesburg, South Africa for a period of at least six months, the Fox News story said.

Another of the breaches, this time involving the bank's treasury network in Washington D.C, appears to have been perpetrated by a contractor or contractors working for India's Satyam Computer Services, the story said. The Satyam employee or contractor infected some workstations at the banks headquarters in Washington with keystroke logging software, which then sent any information it captured to a still unknown location.

Following the discovery of the breach, the World Bank Group immediately shut down its communication link with Satyam's offshore development center in Chennai, India. Satyam, one of India's largest IT services companies, has been handling several IT services functions for the World Bank since July 2003. The contract was due to be renewed this September but was allowed to lapse.

Jim Swords, a U.S.-based spokesman from Satyam, declined to comment on the status of the contract with the World Bank. He read a prepared statement to Computerworld in response to the initial report. The statement basically neither confirmed nor denied the details in the Fox report.

"Upon learning of this report today senior executives initiated an internal investigation to determine the validity of these claims, however unlikely. We will share the findings of the investigation at the conclusion of these efforts," the statement said.

Another pair of intrusions, in June and July, originated from the same group of IP addresses in China as the first attack had come from. This time, however, whoever was behind the attack first compromised an external server run by one of the bank's units and used it to gain access to a server belonging to the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), the World Bank's insurance arm.