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Imagine winning the lottery and having an ATM spit huge amounts of cash at you. That's exactly what some cyber criminals are after. They're targeting ATMs and launching "jackpotting" attacks, forcing them to dispense bills like a winning slot machine. Already this year, the U.S. Secret service has warned financial institutions of such attacks.
Security researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated such an attack and amazed attendees at Black Hat when he made two unpatched ATMs spit out cash on stage. For the most part, however, jackpotting was little more than a hypothetical until recently.
Now, with confirmed strains of malware like Ploutus.D being used in ATM jackpotting attacks on U.S. soil, jackpotting can be added to the growing list of popular ATM attack types, including skimming, shimming and network-based attacks. Here we examine various ATM attack techniques and offer security recommendations to protect against them.
Source: ATM attacks: How hackers are going for gold
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @03:17PM (3 children)
This made me remember a similar way of thinking aboard cruise ships.
The bridge had software to manage radar and ship status for balance, direction, watertight areas, and so on. I noticed clearly it was made using Motif, the widgets, the fonts, the mousepointer was black and turned the other side on menu selections, etc. And all that was running under windows xp! The wtf moment was galactic!
I asked the IT manager onboard how it was possible that a native unix/linux application was ported to run on windows on a ship sized like a small city, wondering how productive that was, how stable that was, how resource efficient that was. His response was, "it is cheaper for the company to employ windows admins who would install and configure that software however complicated it is, compared to linux equivalents doing it on the same exact hardware. And they are much easier and abundant to find everywhere."
The company was MSC Cruises. All computers on it run pirate copies of Windows, office, adobe, and everything else.
You would think stability and robustness is important on a ship that size and with so many people. Well no. The only important thing is to make money and keep costs as low as possible by any means.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @04:01PM (1 child)
Wait, pirate software on a cruise ship? But ... how ... won't that ... um ...
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday May 12 2018, @11:36PM
Yarrrr...it's run by Captain Feathersword!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 12 2018, @09:53PM
Even if turd polishers are a dime a dozen, you're still running life critical stuff on a turd of an OS.
I see a "but everyone is doing it" defense lining up when the ship is stuck in the water, and the turd polishers can't fix the problem by rebooting.