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Up in smoke: How secure ATMs can thwart creative criminals
Blowing up an ATM might not be the very first idea that comes to mind for a criminal, but owners of ATM networks cannot rule out anything.
January 29, 2015
The folks in Australia's "Deep North" are definitely a weird mob, something I have to assume is the byproduct of being close to the equator — the equatorial regions have proved legendary when it comes to outlandish behavior.
Having made numerous trips in the early 1980s to Darwin, capital city of the Northern Territory, I developed a fondness for those who elected to make the city their home. However, the city of Darwin always brought out a somewhat impromptu casualness that Australia's serious southern cities lacked.
At the time of my first trip to Darwin, it was a cash-only society, whether for a round of drinks at the bar, food from the corner store or gas from the local petrol station. Network connectivity for ATMs was pioneered when the IT head of ANZ bank talked the national phone company, Telecom Australia (now simply known as Telstrad) into charging ANZ IT a flat fee no matter where an ATM was located. Check the geography of Australia and you will know what a great deal this proved to be.
All of this is just a background to a headline above a story in the Sydney Morning Herald on Dec. 30, "ATM explosion attempt backfires in Darwin." In what must have been a poorly thought-out endeavor:
A Northern Territory man [was] likely regretting his decision to break into an ATM after the explosive he used backfired. CCTV footage from the ATM in the Darwin suburb of Winnellie shows the man light an explosive before attempting to insert it into the machine. However the heist did not quite go to plan and he was knocked backwards, losing his thongs and fleeing from the scene.
(For the benefit of my American readers, thongs refers to flip-flops, not swimwear.) Needless to say — and if you follow the link in the article, you can see the actual CCTV footage — the ATM was seriously damaged. However, no money was taken; the cash cartridges remained intact even as the ATM went up in smoke.
We have seen our fair share of crash-and-grab assaults on ATMs over the years and sticking an explosive device into the ATM may just be the latest interpretation on this model as robust vehicles may be hard to come by in some regions of the world.
A previous post on this website by Rob Reiter, co-founder of the Storefront Safety Council, begins:
Fifty-thousand dollars of damage in Nutwood, Ohio; more than $100,000 damage in Alberta, Canada; $25,000 damage in Casper, Wyoming, and $43,000 in York County, South Carolina. Tornados? Earthquakes? Drunk drivers? None of the above! This $218,000 worth of damage was caused by thieves bent on stealing ATMs.
Now we can add a couple more tens of thousands to the sum, with the demise of two ATMs in Australia's northernmost city, not forgetting to mention idiots with explosives in the same sentence as tornados and earthquakes.
Making it easy to access an ATM while protecting it from mischief of all types clearly has its challenges. Among my clients, there isn't one that isn't offering a security product or feature — whether it's protecting data at rest or in flight, providing dashboards to alert IT staff, or simply moving files securely. It's a priority for all software vendors — middleware and solutions focused — and the demand for security offerings is proving unquenchable.
This was the theme of a recent post to the blog page of HP NonStop comForte GmbH that directed readers' attention to the fact that, even with the newest iteration of the NonStop system from HP, security remains a key concern. And developments in the NonStop world continue to interest me, as greater than 50 percent of all ATM traffic worldwide passes through at least one NonStop system.
Thomas Burg, chief technology officer at comForte observed:
Clinging to the old and simply hoping to survive ... is less and less an option. Enterprises need to be a lot more proactive going forward and this is the reason why we continue to invest in products designed to shore up security 'defenses' as well as to modernize NonStop systems and their applications.
Computer security is only going to come under even greater scrutiny in the future. No system or platform is immune, and the NonStop community — sitting in the middle of some of the planet's largest networks of ATMs and POS devices — will be subject to the same scrutiny by CIOs as any other system.
NonStop systems really should receive the same amount of attention as any other system in the transaction path. If the term NonStop system is new to you or you are surprised about its massive role in ATM systems, you might want to check out the free publication, "HP NonStop for Dummies."
Blowing up an ATM might not be the very first idea that comes to mind for a criminal, but owners of ATM networks cannot rule out anything. Like it or not, creativity isn't the sole property of IT staff — or commentators and bloggers.
There will always be a subset of society that's up for trying something different when it comes to getting cash for free, and it is up to us to remain diligent and seek out better ways to protect ATMs.
"Up in Smoke," "Gone in 60 Seconds" and the like should be the stuff of movie titles — not ATM references in the popular press!
cover photo courtesy hefin owen | flickr
