Be on your guard: ATM skimming will likely grow due to poor security - News - PC Authority

Be on your guard: ATM skimming will likely grow due to poor security:  by Daniel Long on Jun 30, 2009

ATM security is so poor worldwide, that many more machines are likely to be easily compromised in the future, warns Kaspersky

As the growth of ATM fraud increases around the world exponentially in recent times, anti-malware researchers are keen to solve a crisis in the making.

The bad guys are getting smarter, they're growing distinctively more sophisticated , warns Sergey Golovanov, senior malware Analyst for Kaspersky Lab in Moscow, who is speaking at the 10th Virus Analyst summit in Croatia. Golovanov is an expert on the cyber criminal groups who utilise ATM fraud. And in his work, he's seen some interesting trends pop up.

The problem says Golovanov, is not that security experts aren't looking for a way to solve the multitude of ATM security flaws; it's that their hands are tied. And then placed in a trench of concrete, so to speak.

"We haven't got very far yet...the systems used by banks are closed and they are not going to let outsiders access those systems", insists Golovanov, conjuring up a world where ATMs become easier to break into, because the good guys can't inspect the systems at the root of the cause.

Some ATMs in Russia and other Eastern localities have been found to infected with internal malware scripts that can capture the users details from within, without physical skimming props; a go-to cash making machine that spurts out easy money for criminal networks.

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