Cyber-Criminals Vandalize ATMs to Install Malware
Hackers target machines with higher percentage of large bills.
Researchers revealed at the Chaos Computing Congress in Germany a breach by thieves involving the vandalizing of public ATM machines. The hackers removed a section of several ATM machines in order to infect the machine with malware using USB drives.
The attacks were discovered in July when it was found that European cash dispensers were continually being emptied of their highest denomination of bills. The criminals were able to hide their tracks by covering up the whole made in the machine after attaching their USB drive.
The hackers would later return and enter a 12-digit code which would launch the malware interface. This would allow them to see how many of each denomination of bills were currently in the machine and remove whichever kind they wanted. After examining their code, researchers found that the criminals were quite knowledgeable about the inner workings of the target ATMs and went to great lengths to make their code undecipherable.
Original article by Chris Vallance.
Read the full story here.
