By John Leyden for The Register.
This story has been reproduced with permission.
The suspected perp didn't reprogram the Virginia gas station
machine after he pulled off the scam, so it continued to dispense
more money than it should have for nine days, until some honest
individual pointed out the problem. The suspect used a pre-paid
debit card to make withdrawals, making it harder for police to
track him down. These difficulties prompted investigators to go
public on the scam, which was carried out last month, in the hope
of identifying the suspect from CCTV footage.
The hack was far from sophisticated. Security researchers have
discovered that ATM manuals for the Tranax Mini-Bank 1500 Series,
the machine involved in the Virginia scam, can be easily located
online using nothing more fancy than a Google search query, eWeek
reports.
These manuals explain how to switch ATMs into diagnostic mode,
where its possible to reprogram ATMs in the way carried out in the
Florida gas-station hack, for example.
Would-be fraudsters would still need a PIN code in order to be
able to access functions normally only available to installation
engineers but the manual lists typical factory-set default
passwords. So unless machines have been set up properly, they are
wide open to abuse. It seems the hack is limited to Tranax's line
of mini-bank terminals, though that's unclear. Tranax has delivered
70,000 ATMs, self-service terminals and kiosks across the US. Many
of these installations involve the Mini-Bank 1500 machine that was
the target of the Virginia hack, so the potential for abuse is
clearly high.
We can only hope that the wave of publicity over the scam will
prompt Tranax into action so that the scam is nipped in the bud. At
the very least it ought to pull the copies of its manual offline.
In theory these manuals are only available to authorised
distributors or service providers though at least one
Canadian-based reseller of Tranax terminals has left this
information easily available to all and sundry. The Virginia hack
shows at least some crooks already have their hands on this
information.
© The Register
2006
