World Bank Under Cyber Siege in 'Unprecedented Crisis'

It is still not known how much information was stolen.

But sources inside the bank confirm that servers in the institution's highly-restricted treasury unit were deeply penetrated with spy software last April.

Invaders also had full access to the rest of the bank's network for nearly a month in June and July.

In total, at least six major intrusions --- two of them using the same group of IP addresses originating from China --- have been detected at the World Bank since the summer of 2007, with the most recent breach occurring just last month.

In a frantic midnight e-mail to colleagues, the bank's senior technology manager referred to the situation as an "unprecedented crisis."

In fact, it may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution.

And it has left bank officials scrambling to try to understand the nature of the year-long cyber-assault, while also trying to keep the news from leaking to the public.

The crisis comes at an awkward moment for World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who runs the world's largest and most influential anti-poverty agency, which doles out $25 billion a year, and whose board represents 185 member nations.

This weekend, the bank holds its annual series of meetings in Washington --- and just in advance of those sessions, Zoellick called for a radical revamping of multilateral organizations in light of the global economic meltdown.

According to internal memos, "a minimum of 18 servers have been compromised," including some of the bank's most sensitive systems --- ranging from the bank's security and password server to a Human Resources server "that contains scanned images of staff documents."

One World Bank director tells FOX News that as many as 40 servers have been penetrated, including one that held contract-procurement data.

Requests for on-the-record interviews with Zoellick and other top officials were declined.

Meanwhile, the bank's treasurer, Kenneth G. Lay, has been briefing Zoellick's senior management team regularly on the situation since April.

The bank's chief information officer, Guy De Poerck, has engaged Price Waterhouse Coopers to do a confidential million-dollar assessment that is expected to tell him what's going on in his own department.

And a 22-page internal report by a computer security company named MANDIANT, dated August 18, fleshes out many details of the June-July breaches.

It's unclear how that statement squares with an internal memo to De Poerck a month earlier revealing that a sensitive Human Resources server "that contains scanned images of staff documents" had been successfully breached.

As a clearinghouse for financial data from both governments and companies, the bank's computers could provide intruders with both a financial and intelligence gold mine --- from inside information on bids and contracts to the minutes of confidential board meetings.

"If you know beforehand that the bank is going to put an order in for oil pipelines in Chad or healthcare systems in India, you can actually make a good amount of money," says one insider.

Some insiders fear that contractors --- perhaps even governments --- might be seeking advance knowledge on the status of the bank's anti-corruption probes.

The feds pointed to a part of the bank's network that led out of the Johannesburg hub of the International Finance Corp. (IFC), a bank arm that lends to the private sector.

Within a week of the tip, teams of bank investigators sent to Johannesburg discovered that intruders had gained full and total access to all of IFC's worldwide information --- including all incoming and outgoing e-mail --- for at least six months.

After a forensic analysis of the treasury breach, bank investigators discovered that spy software was covertly installed on workstations inside the bank's Washington headquarters --- allegedly by one or more contractors from Satyam Computer Services, one of India's largest IT companies.

The software --- which operates through a method known as keystroke logging --- enabled every character typed on a keyboard to be transmitted to a still-unknown location via the Internet.

Upon its discovery, insiders report, bank officials shut off the data link between Washington and Chennai, India, where Satyam has long operated the bank's sole offshore computer center responsible for all of the bank's financial and human resources information.

Once they did, they shut down all external servers, except for e-mail --- which it turns out the invaders were already using as their entrance point.

Automated summary from: FOXNews.com