ATMs fall victim to malware

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June 23rd, 2009 - Posted by Kent

Robert Siciliano's blog piece on ATM card skimming probably had a lot of people checking their ATMs for tiny cameras above the keypads and card-skimmers attached to the card slot. This month, New Scientist is reporting on a method for skimming card data that is completely invisible to users of cash machines. In fact, it's nearly-undetectable to systems administrators who deal with the machines on a regular basis. Hackers have found a way to insert malware (aka malicious software) into the ATM's Windows operating system that reads all the customer's data just the way the machine does. What's even more bizarre is that the criminals harvest the data using the ATM's own receipt printer to print out the data. The malware is installed by direct access to the ATM's CPU (essentially it's brain), which means the hacker has to go behind the scenes for the initialization. That's actually the good news, because it means there's a certain physical barrier to the installation. You can read the whole article here.

So far, it's not very widespread, but the fear is that eventually the malware could spread over ATM networks. It's a good reminder to check your bank activity regularly. Using a credit monitoring service, such as the ones listed in our Credit report monitoring services chart will help maintain your overall financial security.