Digital sleuths are linking North Korea to a series of cyber attacks on banks around Asia.  They say it's the first apparent case of a country using digital attacks for financial gain.

The digital security firm Symantecsays the attackers used the same, rare string of code in attacks on a bank in the Philippines last October, on the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam in December, and on the central bank in Bangladesh in February that resulted in the theft of more than AU$112 Million.  But investigators had seen this code before:  The hacking attack at Sony Pictures in December 2014 and attacks on banks and media companies in South Korea in 2013.  Those episodes had been attributed to Pyongyang.

"If you believe North Korea was behind those attacks, then the bank attacks were also the work of North Korea," said Symantec's Eric Chien told the New York Times.  "We've never seen an attack where a nation-state has gone in and stolen money," he added, "This is a first."

These attacks were all targered at banks in developing nations.  But the banks have access to "Swift", which is a Brussels-based banking consortium used by 11,000 banks and companies to move money from one country to another.  Swift says the attackers didn't get access to its network, and isn't assigning blame just yet.

The AU$112 Million stolen from Bangladesh doesn't seem like much, until you realize it was part of almost $1.4 Billion in requests for digital money transfers to mysterious Philippine bank accounts.  Bangladesh officials were able to cut it off before it went too far. 

Years of international financial sanctions against North Korea have left its economy in tatters, and the country's gross domestic product is believed to be an anemic AU$12 Billion to $40 Billion.  If the Bangladesh heist was planned by Pyongyang and if it were fully successful, it could have addedas much as ten percent to North Korea's GDP.