These types of attacks involve criminals connecting programmed Black Box devices to the cash dispenser to bypass security and collect money in as little as 10 minutes on certain models. The US Secret Service issued an urgent ATM threat warning to banks in October 2018, as attacks against ATMs have become increasingly common across the globe.
On 76% of the ATMs tested, exiting kiosk mode was possible, which would allow attackers to potentially run commands in the ATM operating system. They would only need about 15 minutes to complete this attack.At the moment, 85% of ATMs are poorly secured against network attacks, such as spoofing the processing center, the report found. This potentially allows criminals to interfere with the transaction confirmation process, and fake a response from the processing center to approve every withdrawal request, or increase the amount of money dispensed.
Even worse, attackers can also gain access to GSM modems connected to ATMs, and use them to attack other ATMs on the same network, or even the internal network of the bank.
The vast majority of ATMs tested (92%) were vulnerable to a number of attacks due to a failure to implement hard drive encryption. This means an attacker could connect directly to an ATM hard drive and infect it with malware to disable security, controlling the cash dispenser, the report noted.
To reduce the risk of attack and speed threat response, banks should work to physically secure ATMs, the Positive Technologies report recommended.
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