Bangladesh Bank website taken offline amid global cybersecurity alert

The official website of Bangladesh Bank, the country's central bank, has been inaccessible since Thursday noon following a global cybersecurity alert.

Bangladesh Bank Executive Director and spokesperson Arief Hossain Khan confirmed the development, saying the website had been taken offline as a precautionary measure.

"We received a global security alert and took the website down as a precaution. Our IT department is working on the matter," he said.

The spokesperson, however, did not specify when the website would be restored.

Visitors attempting to access the central bank's website were greeted with a maintenance notice stating: "The Service is under Maintenance. Our service is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. We will be back online shortly. Thank you for your patience."

The precautionary shutdown comes amid growing international concern over critical security vulnerabilities reportedly identified in PHP, a programming language widely used to develop websites and online services.

According to international reports, researchers associated with cybersecurity firms Calif and Wiz identified the vulnerabilities with the assistance of artificial intelligence tools. Security patches were subsequently released, although details of the flaws reportedly became public before all affected systems could be updated.

Several organisations worldwide have taken precautionary measures in response to the reported vulnerabilities.

Government agencies in the Netherlands, France, Denmark and Finland reportedly took certain websites offline on Wednesday to reduce the risk of potential cyberattacks.

Telecommunications company Orange and Japanese financial institutions, including Nomura and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, were also reported to have temporarily suspended some online services.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare reportedly recorded a sharp increase in attempted cyberattacks, while data attributed to internet intelligence firm Censys suggested that approximately 1.5 million out of 2.6 million surveyed servers had yet to receive the necessary security fixes.

However, no evidence has been provided to establish that Bangladesh Bank's website was compromised or that its temporary shutdown resulted from an actual cyberattack.

Previous cybersecurity incidents
Bangladesh Bank has experienced major cybersecurity incidents in the past. In February 2016, hackers used fraudulent payment instructions to divert $101 million from the central bank's account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Of that amount, $81 million was transferred to accounts in the Philippines, while a separate $20 million transfer to Sri Lanka was stopped.

Following the incident, Atiur Rahman resigned as governor of Bangladesh Bank.

In 2023, the central bank also temporarily suspended some of its internal web-based services for approximately 36 hours as a precaution against a possible cyberattack.