14 DAY TRIAL // Tanvir Hassan Zoha, 34, security researcher, has gone missing just days after accusing Bangladesh's central bank officials of negligence, which facilitated the theft of over $81 million from the country's oversea accounts.
On February 5, 2016, hackers accessed the accounts of Bangladesh's central bank at the US Federal Reserve Bank in New York and tried to steal $1 billion dollars. Their attempt to transfer the money was thwarted by a simple typo, but not before managing to take $81 million.
In the investigation that followed, security researchers blamed malware and a faulty printer but at the same time said that the Bangladesh central bank officials were also to blame because of weak security procedures. The bank's governor and two deputy governors had to quit their jobs after the scandal.
Security researcher goes missing, possibly kidnapped, if not worse
In a weird turn of events, one of the security researchers who voiced their criticism at the central bank’s security measures disappeared on Wednesday night.
Family members are saying that Zoha met with a friend at 11:30 PM on Wednesday night, March 16. While coming home, a jeep pulled in front of their auto-rickshaw, and men separated the two, putting them in two different cars.
Zoha's friend was dumped somewhere in the city (Dhaka) and was able to get home by 02:00 AM, the next day. He then contacted Zoha's family, who said the security researcher never came home.
The next day, family members tried to report the researcher missing, but police officers just kept redirecting them from one police station to another until the family gave up and contacted the media for help.
The media's reports angered Bangladesh's population, who was already annoyed by the fact that government officials almost lost $1 billion of their money. The following day, government officials put out a statement on Zoha's disappearance but did not say much outside the fact that they opened an investigation.
Zoha publicly criticized Bangladesh's central bank
According to BDNews24, Zoha was a former collaborator of Bangladesh's ICT (Information and Communication Technology) Division and worked with various government agencies in the past. It appears that his comments about the Bangladesh central bank cyber-heist were made working as a "shadow investigator" for a security company that family members declined to name.
Answering questions about his own investigation into the central bank's cyber-heist, Zoha said that the "database administrator of the [Bangladesh Bank] server cannot avoid responsibility for such hacking" and that he "noticed apathy about the [server's] security system."
Family members suspect that these comments Zoha made to the press on March 11 are the cause of his disappearance.
UPDATE: On March 19, three days after Zoha was kidnapped, police still have no clues. The Bangla Tribune has also found an interview (in Bengali) in which Zoha had criticized bank officials.
UPDATE 2: Zoha was found by police a week later, loitering the streets, near a railway station, somewhere in the north of Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka.