At
the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas this week, IOActive’s director of
security research gave a demonstration of how he learned to crack the security
of various standalone ATMs after coming across several errors and security
weaknesses in their [software] coding, allowing him to gain full access to the
machines’ safes. He wrote multiple programs to exploit some of the machines’
weaknesses including one that allows him to gain remote entry without the need
of a password, which he calls Dillinger, and a second program, Scrooge, that
relies on a back-door entry with the ability to conceal itself from the
machine’s main operating system. In the case of Triton’s ATMs, the researcher
found the motherboard of the machine was sorely lacking in physical security,
and once he had gained access to it, he was easily able to use a similar
back-door technique then simply trick the machine into thinking that the hack
was actually a legitimate update. So far, the researcher has attempted to hack
four different ATMs and, as he demonstrated at the conference, he has found
that the same “game over vulnerability” has enabled him to crack every one of
them.
Concerning
the growing problem of skimming, Security Magazine Blog has learned of one of
the biggest thefts so far. Police have released images of five men believed to
linked to an international ATM skimming scam that has fleeced millions of
dollars from Melbourne, Australia, bank customers this year. At least 28
machines around Melbourne have been compromised since March in an elaborate
scheme believed to have links to Eastern European crime gangs. The crime
syndicate is one of two that are preying on Melburnians and stealing their card
details and cash. In a separate scam, Melbourne shop workers are being offered
upwards of $40,000 to let scammers tamper with their Eftpos machines, enabling
them to steal the PINs and card details of shoppers. The devices, including a
card reader and a pinhole camera, had been placed on ATMs outside banks and on
stand-alone machines with a high turnover of customers, including at large
shopping centers. All banks were being targeted.
In
the U.S., the skimmers have started hitting gas pump skimmers. Thieves have
placed credit-card skimming devices in the housing of gas pumps at 12 stations
in Colorado. Federal authorities are tight-lipped about the investigation, so
it is up to station owners and customers to take steps to protect sensitive information.
However, a representative from the Colorado Wyoming Petroleum Marketers
Association said: “The gasoline industry has just finished a nationwide system
upgrade that [only] secures customer information on the back end,” so that once
the credit card information is processed at the pump, it is triple encoded and
cannot be stored at the station itself. He added that the only remaining access
point for people who want to compromise this information is at the beginning of
the transaction at the pump. The petroleum industry representative recommends
paying with cash, or taking a credit card to the station’s attendant inside.
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