ATM thieves have found a way to bypass just swiping your card data to gain access to automated teller machines and force them to dispense large amounts of cash. A hack called “jackpotting” which has been a problem in Europe, Asia, and Mexico for years has finally made its way to the good ole United States of America.
According to a warning from the US Secret Service, two prominent ATM makers Diebold Nixdorf and NCR are in danger of having their machines fall victims of these hacks.
Sounds like something straight out of a movie and it kinda was if you saw Terminator 2 there was a particular scene that accurately depicts what these ATM thieves are doing.
The technological thieves seem to focus their advance attacks on Diebold’s front-loading Opteva ATMs that are usually found in retail stores and drive-thrus.During previous threats, the thieves will disguise themselves as technicians to not draw unwanted suspicion to themselves. They would then hook a laptop up to the ATM that would have malware and a mirror image of the of the operating system running on the machine.
Now they in order to gain complete access to the ATM the thieves would have to push the reset button on the inside which is not as difficult. They use an endoscope to search inside the machine for the reset button and once it’s found and pressed they attach a keyboard and clean out the ATM.
Definitely sounds like something out of Mission Impossible.
These attacks could be easily thwarted, in the Secret Service’s report they point out that the ATM’s running on Window XP (a 16-year old operating system) are more susceptible to jackpotting. So basically if they updated to Windows 7 or 10 they would be able to protect their machines. There is no word if the companies will make these changes hastily but as the reports of jackpotting have not reached alarming levels yet.But to wait until that point could also prove to be very detrimental as well, it would serve them better to jump on this matter as soon as possible.
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Photo: Caiaimage/Paul Bradbury
