Even ATM got Virused!

Believe it or not; this is the year of 2009, where all internet-connected devices got infected! None of them can can be considered secure anymore (at least for those which have been attending the competition for more than 12 months). Let’s name it - floppy disk, CD, DVD, USB drive, Email Attachment (including most of the common extensions; .exe, .doc, .vbs, .zip, etc) - none of them have no viruses anymore! Even new devices such as BlackBerry and other kind of Smart Phones got their own viruses! This include the mighty Apple products which supposed to claimed themselves as one of the securest computers with no viruses now cornered to promote compatible Anti Virus for their machines!

But what makes me laugh (really, I’m laughing when I heard this news) is that even an ATM (Auto Teller Machine) now got their own virus! Maybe we’re not going to call it Virus since we do know a little bit about all malicious softwares characteristic - then lets call it Keylogger/Trojan. Of course, due to the function of this malicious software which going to infect one particular ATM machine and steal any information - such as bank account and PIN number of the customer card (and please assume that they will also copied all of your credentials magnetic card information, since it’s not too hard to read, believe me). Doing this, they’ll be able to steal your money directly! The question left will be - is it possible?


Not because of what Kaspersky said to the media, but it’s more onto the logic of virus infection to one particular machine, I’d like to say that this kind of a Virus is possible to make (and perhaps not that hard when you know the basic knowledge of the ATM machine itself). Why? Because even Kaspersky said that this Virus is not affecting any major banks in any countries yet (in fact there are only very little amount of ATM being infected by this Virus) which can also be assumed that in order to run this Virus, one ATM need to meet basic requirement!

What do you think the requirement will be? Since I am not the expert of ATM technology or anything - I can only guess that one of the requirement can possibly be the ATM’s operating systems! Will you get the big picture if I said that there are several ATM machines that uses Windows and even run Internet Explorer around? Then, will you call this infection possible? Hehehe! Don’t be so skeptic about the ATM technology - allow me to show you this:

Click here for comments related to ATM machine running Windows XP in Indonesia (Featuring Indonesian language inside).

Click here for the article talking about ATM running Windows XP after rebooting (Featuring English language inside).

And look at this picture (perhaps they really need to even clear cookies):



What makes this even scarier than those news regarding to the Internet-banking stealer trojans is because:

Due to very limited access to any ATM machine (customers won’t be able to do Virus scanning on ATM machines)
Due to the number of all ATM machines that one bank might have - even when one got infected, they will not be able to clean the viruses up in time, several customers might got their information stolen.
Both the bank and customers won’t be notified (manually or automatically) when one particular ATM machine got infected by this kind of a Virus.
Even though security camera implemented around the ATM area - there still are several ways to deceive it; let’s count Camera Jammer as one!
So far, Diebold is the only one kind of an ATM machine that reported to be infected by the Virus (don’t exhale your breath and relaxed first - even in Indonesia we’ve got this kind of a machine; check the BCA ATM machine right on the left side of Istana Korea restaurant, near beside Grand Indonesia Mall), however, when they reach NCR as one of their victims - everybody will quit using ATM and Fast Cash machines worrying about their credentials! LoL!