Chinese currency RMB use. 1280 financial institutions in 103 countries and regions have connected to the system SFMS: sponsored by India SPFS: sponsored by Russia, mostly composed of Russian banks INSTEX: sponsored by the European Union, limited to non-USD transactions for trade with Iran, largely unused and ineffective Security In 2016 an $81 million theft from the Bangladesh central bank via its account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank was traced to hacker penetration of SWIFT's Alliance Access software, according to a New York Times report. It was not the first such attempt, the society acknowledged, and the security of the transfer system was undergoing new examination accordingly. Soon after the reports of the theft from the Bangladesh central bank, a second, apparently related, attack was reported to have occurred on a commercial bank in Vietnam. Both attacks involved malware written to both issue unauthorized SWIFT messages and to conceal that the messages had been sent. After the malware sent the SWIFT messages that stole the funds, it deleted the database record of the transfers then took further steps to prevent confirmation messages from revealing the theft. In the Bangladeshi case, the confirmation messages would have appeared on a paper report; the malware altered the paper reports when they were sent to the printer. In the second case, the bank used a PDF report; the malware altered the PDF viewer to hide the transfers. In May 2016, Banco del Austro (BDA) in Ecuador sued Wells Fargo after Wells Fargo honoured $12 million in fund transfer requests that had been placed by thieves. In this case, the thieves sent SWIFT messages that resembled recently cancelled transfer requests from BDA, with slightly altered amounts; the reports do not detail how the thieves gained access to send the SWIFT messages. BDA asserts that Wells Fargo should have detected the suspicious SWIFT messages, which were placed outside of normal BDA working hours and were of an unusual size. Wells Fargo claims that BDA is responsible for the loss, as the thieves gained access to the legitimate SWIFT credentials of a BDA employee and sent fully authenticated SWIFT messages. In the first half of 2016, an anonymous Ukrainian bank and others—even "dozens" that are not being made public—were variously reported to have been "compromised" through the SWIFT network and to have lost money. In March 2022, Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung reported about the