One of the most enduring scenes in the 1994 action movie classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day, is the scene in which a young John Connor (Edward Furlong) uses a computer-type device with a fake card to hack into an ATM machine and clean out someone’s bank account in the process of getting himself a little spending cash. No doubt Barnaby Jack, and a lot of other hackers, was inspired by that scene, which is why he took to the stage at the Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, to hack into a couple of stand-alone ATM machines and force them to spit out all their cash.
The two machines in the demo were made by Tranax Technologies and Triton, but they’re not the only ones vulnerable to rootkits and other malicious hacker tricks. “Every ATM I’ve looked at, I’ve found a game-over vulnerability that allows an attacker to get cash from the machine,” said Jack, the director of security at Seattle-based IOActive. “I’ve looked at four ATMs. I’m four for four.”
For their part, Triton says they detected and issued a patch for their machines last November, which sealed up the hole Jack used to hack into their cash machine. Still, because it’s up to the individual to patch their machine’s software, that security hole might be there. In some cases, hacking into an ATM is as simple as using a dial-up modem and telling it to release its money! Given that most ATMs run off Windows CE, they ought to be pretty vulnerable to hackers.
Tags: Las Vegas, Nevada, hackers, Black Hat conference, Barnaby Jack, ATM machines can be hacked, Tranax Technologies, Triton, IOActive, hacking ATM machines, stand-alone ATMs, security
