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Software gets tough on skimmers, other bad guys

April 18, 2004

Poker players use "tells" to help identify and overcome opponents' weaknesses.

Can "tells" help ATM deployers defeat scams?

While most fraud-fighting efforts have focused on detecting fraud at ATMs where a criminal enters stolen card data, software developer Gasper Corporation advocates attacking fraud at the point of compromise, ATMs where data is harvested.

"The sooner you can detect the compromise, the more you can reduce the amount of damage," said Ken Cooper, a Gasper product marketing manager.

Common forms of harvesting data, including Lebanese Loop traps and "ghost" overlays, yield "tells" at the ATM. For instance, a lack of transactions combined with a lack of ATM faults often indicates an overlay. Card traps cause a high number of repeated card reader errors. A motorized card reader and lack of a camera increase odds of scams occurring.

"The ATM does a good job of alerting us to events outside of the norm," Cooper said.

He said deployers can use management software to group high-risk machines and create thresholds to help identify suspicious situations. Some systems allow deployers to respond with automated responses, ranging from dispatching a technician to shutting down the machine.

While shutting down seems drastic, Cooper said sometimes it's appropriate. "If you had a skimmer sitting there for four hours before a service tech got there, hundreds of cards could be compromised at a high-volume site."

ATM manufacturers also are taking a more proactive approach. Wincor Nixdorf, Diebold and NCR have modified card readers to detect foreign devices.

In some cases when a device is detected, the machine shuts itself down until the device is removed, then reboots itself. In other cases, an ATM will shut down before the customer can enter a PIN, and the card cannot be removed until a service technician is dispatched to the machine.

"It might inconvenience the customer momentarily, but it's nothing compared to the inconvenience they could suffer if their card was stolen," said Saul Caprio, Wincor's director of U.S. business development.

NCR machines can be configured to go out of service for a pre-determined amount of time if foreign devices are detected.

Similarly, Diebold's Opteva ATMs use sensors to detect foreign devices and report it to the host. Diebold also recessed the card reader into the front of Opteva ATMs to help make any foreign devices more obvious to ATM users.

Another feature is available on some NCR and Diebold machines. Called "jitter," it changes the speed of the card as it enters the motorized readers, making it difficult for thieves to get usable data. Once a proper card is detected at the internal read head, the jittering feature is disabled and a constant read speed is applied so that data can be collected.

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