Gardaí are investigating a cyber attack on the accounts of College’s Trinity Foundation where it is believed up to €1 million may have been stolen.
According to the Irish Sun the attack, which they report might have cost the College as much as €1 million, was detected by police in the UK who noticed suspicious activity in accounts and subsequently raised concerns with Bank of Ireland.
In an email statement to The University Times, Tom Molloy, Trinity’s Director of Public Affairs and Communications, confirmed that the Trinity Foundation, which is responsible for raising philanthropic funds for the College, was alerted to suspicious activity in its accounts, but did not confirm when this suspicious activity had been discovered or how much had been stolen.
“Some money was recovered following the discovery but it is too early to say whether everything can be recovered. Any shortfall will be made up from the university’s future commercial revenues”, Molloy said.
An external investigation by the Gardaí is ongoing, while Trinity is also conducting its own internal investigation, and, Molloy said, have “engaged an external computer forensic team to assist in establishing the technical details of what happened”. The Data Protection Commissioner has also been informed by Trinity and is working with College.
Known as “invoice redirect” or “CEO fraud”, the scam saw the cyber attackers hacking genuine email accounts of the foundation’s beneficiaries. The scammers then posed as the beneficiaries of the foundation by using the email addresses they had hacked, and asked the foundation to send future payments to alternative bank accounts that the real beneficiaries would have no access to. Once obtained, the cash was then sent to different accounts in England and America as part of the huge financial racket, according to the Irish Sun.
Thanks to the action of officers in the US and UK, €250,000 taken from the college was frozen in several bank accounts and will now be returned to the foundation, the Irish Sun report.
Latest accounts for the Trinity Foundation show that its income rose from €53 million in 2015 to €73 million in 2016 as it attempts to boost philanthropic donations to €400 million by 2021.
Amid an ongoing higher education funding crisis, the College is increasingly relying on non-state streams of revenue, such as philanthropy and commercialisation. This strategy has involved improving vistors’ experiences in the College, increasing Trinity’s brand and working with corporations.
