Windows to Power ATM's in 2005

[Kyle Plummer]

Another item regarding banks and ATM's.  Early ATM's (some are still in the
field) were controller base unit.  The current crop of ATM's are PC based
early Pentiums.  Mostly do to the graphical displays used to help clients
make transactions, and to sell ad space.   As far as the servers at a
branch.  They are fairly current CPU's running Win2000.  But, most PC's that
the branch personell use are early Pentiums or 486's.  I don't think banks
will scrap all that hardware just to run WinXP.  The same would go for
ATM's.  It would be a win for M$, but costly for the banks.  Newer ATM's
have been able to run MPEG-2 app's since the late 90's.  I think this is a
good plea for Linux.  Hopefully someone will see the light.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Chris Devers" <cdevers at pobox.com>
To: "Jerry Feldman" <gaf at blu.org>
Cc: <discuss at blu.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 9:23 PM
Subject: Re: Windows to Power ATM's in 2005


> On Mon, 22 Sep 2003, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>
> > On 22 Sep 2003 16:08:36 -0400
> > Seth Gordon <sethg at ropine.com> wrote:
> >
> > > A few creative thieves have put up kiosks in shopping malls that look
> > > like ATMs; the machines read off the mag-strips of whatever cards are
> > > swiped through, take the PINs, and then tell the customer "service
> > > temporarily unavailable" or whatever.  The thieves used this
> > > information to duplicate the cards and use them to withdraw money from
> > > real ATMs.
> > >
> > > [similar examples snipped]
> >
> > And related to this some very sophisticated thieves use real ATMs and
> > attach their hardware. Unsuspecting people swipe their cards and enter
> > their pin numbers not knowing that the thieves are recording it.
>
>
> There was a string of incidents like this around here a few months ago.
> Creepy stuff.
>
>
> Anyone interested in this stuff should take a look at Bruce Schneier's
> _Secrets & Lies_. One section of the book talks about these kinds of ATM
> attacks at length, and talks about how it took several years to get all
> the design considerations worked out -- for example, interface decisions
> such as having the machine beep annoyingly until the card is removed from
> the slot, because early users kept forgetting their card & the next person
> in line would often end up stealing it.
>
> Then extrapolate from how hard it was to get ATMs right -- and the basic
> design is probably still evolving, I'd assume -- and consider what it'll
> be like if/when we get electronic voting machines.
>
> In my opinion, the fraud that the first, naive implementations of these
> machines will allow is going to make Florida 2000 look like Mickey Mouse
> stuff -- and potentially much easier to get away with, because leaving a
> paper trail out of the system is for some bizarre reason an explicitly
> design goal of most of the systems proposed.
>
> And yeah, they'll probably also run Windows :-/
>
>
>
> -- 
> Chris Devers
> tired of living in "interesting times"
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