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By Clare Baldwin and Joseph MennHONG KONG/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Documents and computer files released by hackers provide a blueprint for how the U.S. National Security Agency likely used weaknesses in commercially available software to gain access to the global system for transferring money between banks, a review of the data showed.On Friday, a group calling itself the Shadow Brokers released documents and files indicating NSA had accessed the SWIFT money-transfer system through service providers in the Middle East and Latin America. That release was the latest in a series of disclosures by the group in recent months.Matt Suiche, founder...

A huge range of security exploits, said to be worth over $2m if sold on the black market, have been leaked online.The tools are said to have been created by the US National Security Agency (NSA), and accompanying documents appear to indicate a possible breach of the Swift global banking system.Such a hack could have enabled the US to covertly monitor financial transactions, researchers said.The files were released by Shadow Brokers, a hacking group that has previously leaked malware.If genuine, it represents perhaps the most significant exposure of NSA files since the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013.On Twitter, Mr Snowden...

If the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is shut down in Russia, the country’s banking system will not crash, according to Central Bank Governor Elvira Nabiullina. Russia has a substitute. "There were threats that we can be disconnected from SWIFT. We have finished working on our own payment system, and if something happens, all operations in SWIFT format will work inside the country. We have created an alternative," Nabiullina said at a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday. She also added that 90 percent of ATMs in Russia are ready to accept the Mir payment system, a...

VISA and blockchain-technology partner BTL will invite a select group of European banks to participate in a blockchain project that will see inter-bank payments made via transfers over the ledger. Hot on the heels of the likes of R3, Visa will experiment its own blockchain-based payments platform with a select group of banks who will send money over a blockchain. The proof-of-concept project will use Interbit, a cross-border blockchain remittance and settlement platform developed by industry startup BTL. Launched earlier this year, the Interbit platform is seen by Visa as the solution to “reduce cost, settlement time, credit risk, and...

He'd borrowed from banks and investors and retirement funds, all in a frenzied mission to drill for oil and gas, and by the time Terry Swift realized he'd gone too far, this was his debt: $1.349 billion. His company, founded by his father almost 40 years earlier, had plunged into bankruptcy and laid off 25 percent of its staff. Its shares had been pulled from the New York Stock Exchange. And now Swift was in a company Chevrolet Tahoe, driving back to the flat and dusty place where his bets had gone bust. Swift was coming to this energy-rich strip...

As promised earlier in the year, Apple’s Swift team has now posted source code for the Swift compiler and standard library functions and objects. Open-sourcing Swift is a big win for the developer community as it means Swift can now be setup to run on a server and many other use cases, bringing Apple programming talent and expertise beyond ‘just’ making apps iOS devices and Macs.Making Swift open-source also gives the developer community as a whole more confidence in the language. Theoretically, if Apple ever decided to move away from Swift (which is unlikely), the language could be picked up...

An article by Italian journalist Maurizio Blondet is making the rounds alleging that Pope Benedict XVI was blackmailed into abdication by forces allied with SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which had a hand in the shutdown of ATM and bank card services at the Vatican in January of 2012. According to Blondet: There was a blackmail of Benedict XVI, coming from who knows where, through SWIFT. The underlying reasons for this have not been clarified, but it is clear that SWIFT has intervened directly in the management of affairs of the Church. This particular theory is not...

This is starting to not be funny anymore. Ratzinger non poté “né vendere né comprare” Ratzinger he could "neither sell nor buy" Maurizio Blondet Roughly translated by Google: "Few know what SWIFT (the acronym stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) is: in theory, is a global "clearing house", uniting 10,500 banks in 215 countries. In fact, is the most occult and sole center of American-globalist financial power, a bastion of blackmail on which the hegemony of the dollar, the most powerful means of political and economic espionage (to the detriment especially for us Europeans) and the means by...

That's $20M a stem... Much like how Fred Astaire took-out a policy on his legendary dancin' legs for $75K a pop -and national treasure Dolly Parton hedged her ginormous, iconic boobs for $600K (for the set)- contemporary pop star Taylor Swift has now insured her own (Grade-A) legs for a cool $40M. And although her music is not entirely my cup of tea, I've heard worse (plus she's actually a songwriter- I respect that). Alas, they might have guessed a bit light on the legs appraisal- seems to have become her trademark already, and no doubt more than a minor element of...

Jalene Salinas loves Taylor Swift. All the 4-year-old Texas girl wanted was a chance to meet her idol and dance to her hit song “Shake It Off.” Meeting the pop singer was the only thing left on what the toddler’s bucket list – as the family calls the list that they started about 10 months ago after she was diagnosed with brain cancer. On Monday night, the little girl got her wish. Jalene’s mom Jennifer Arriagas told Eyewitness News that the pop singer chatted with the family for 20 minutes during a surprise call via Facetime.

Once more the spoiler. Despite the earnest persuasion of the White House to preserve a useful weapon in the war against the terrorists, the New York Times has revealed the workings of a covert surveillance program, indisputably within the law, to use administrative subpoenas to examine, through a Belgian financial consortium known by the acronym SWIFT, the financing of international terrorism. Once the story was out, the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal covered it as well. Now the program is damaged, perhaps severely so, and the financing of terror is harder to track. This is another unnecessary leak,...

New York Times reporter James Risen is facing prison if he doesn’t reveal sources that gave him highly classified information on U.S. intelligence in Iran. Gabriel Schoenfeld says no reporter is above the law.

Rebekah filmed herself opening the package, in which she found a handwritten note from Swift. “I was thinking about you today, and how you have been there cheering me on in the most thoughtful and creative ways,” Swift wrote to Rebekah, mentioning a video and other posts Rebekah made. Swift continued, “I got out my paints for the first time in a while today and made you something. I really, really, really hope you like it. I’m not a good painter, but you’re so beautiful and positive, even though you’re dealing with the stress life brings, so I wanted to...

If, when in February Victoria Nuland infamously launched a (not so) covert campaign to replace the ruling Ukraine president oblivious to the human casualties, resulting in a civil war in east Ukraine, NATO encroachment along the borders of Russia, and a near-terminal escalation in hostilities between Ukraine, Russian, and various regional NATO members, the US intention was to provoke the Kremlin so hard that the nation with the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources would jettison the US Dollar and in the process begin the unraveling of the USD reserve currency status (as much as Jared Bernstein desires...

John Kerry, speaking on Face the Nation, defended Barack Obama’s delay in implementing action against Bashar Assad while he goes to Congress for authorization. Host Major Garrett asked, "I know you believe the president’s decision to seek congressional authorization is courageous, but isn’t it bowing to a political reality that had been communicated to the president late this week that there would be significant congressional backlash if he didn’t give Congress a role, and that backlash, in part, reflected the inability of the Administration to make its case this past week?" Kerry responded that President Obama had not shown any...

Taylor Swift is adding to her property portfolio after securing a $17.75 million deal for a new seaside home in Rhode Island. The I Knew You Were Trouble hitmaker recently went house hunting along the U.S. northeast coast with her mother Andrea, father Scott and younger brother Austin, and she appears to have settled on a lavish estate in the town of Westerly. The property, which boasts five bedrooms and sweeping views of the Atlantic Ocean, had reportedly been on the market for $20 million - but Swift managed to use her charms to negotiate the lower price -- she...

SALT LAKE CITY — Undocumented and legal Latinos gathered with a diverse crowd Wednesday night in Salt Lake to send a message to Washington: They want change in U.S. immigration laws. "This is a human issue and ... these are families that are being separated," said Itza Hernandez. "We need some kind of change to the broken immigration system." Hernandez, a member of the Salt Lake Dream Team, is an undocumented immigrant who has lived in Utah since she was 4 years old. She and others who spoke at the vigil hoped that lawmakers in Washington and neighbors at home...

Iran may impose a blockade on oil exports that threaten the world’s economies as a reaction to new unprecedented sanctions, says its former intelligence minister Ali Fallahian. Belgium’s Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), which handles most international bank transfers, has eliminated Iran from its services. The move is a “direct result of international and multilateral action to intensify financial sanctions against Iran," said SWIFT CEO Lazaro Campos. The embargo on Iran took effect Saturday and reduces Iran’s ability to use a secure network to receive payments. It also will affect Iranians wanting to receive money from relatives outside...

While we have long known that the drachma, and recently the lira, have seen significant "when issued" interest by institutional clients desiring to hedge their currency collapse exposure, and thus early markets by various trading desks, little did we realize just how destabilizing this fact to the system would be, at least according to SWIFT. According to the WSJ, this organization, best known for making an abrupt appearance any time one wishes to do a wire transfer, then promptly disappearing until the next such instance, ended up promptly shutting down any Plan B optionality when "at least two global banks...

Enlarge Image Breathing fire. A distant cosmic explosion detected 28 March (left) continues to put out a series of high-energy flares (right). Astronomers believe it's a star being consumed by a black hole 3.8 billion light-years away. Credit: (left, galaxy) ASA/Swift/Stefan Immler; (right, diagram) NASA/Swift/Penn State/J. Kennea Astronomers have observed possibly the biggest blast ever seen in the cosmos. When NASA's SWIFT space observatory first spotted it 10 days ago, observers thought it was a massive star blowing up as a supernova and expected it to fade within hours or even minutes. But the high-energy radiation from the source...