ATM is safe?

Hackers have crossed into new frontiers by devising sophisticated ways to steal large amounts of personal identification numbers, or PINs, protecting credit and debit cards, says an investigator. The attacks involve both unencrypted PINs and encrypted PINs that attackers have found a way to crack, according to the investigator behind a new report looking at the data breaches.


http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/pins.html

Other kinds of attacks occur against PINs after they arrive at the card-issuing bank Once encrypted PINs arrive at the HSM at the issuing bank, the HSM communicates with the bank's mainframe system to decrypt the PIN and the customer's 16-digit account number for a brief period to authorize the transaction.

During that period, the data is briefly held in the system's memory in unencrypted form.

Sartin says some attackers have created malware that scrapes the memory to capture the data.

"Memory scrapers are in as much as a third of all cases we're seeing, or utilities that scrape data from unallocated space," Sartin says. "This is a huge vulnerability."

He says the stolen data is often stored in a file right on the hacked system.

"These victims don't see it," Sartin says. "They rely almost purely on anti-virus to detect things that show up on systems that aren't supposed to be there. But they're not looking for a 30-gig file growing on a system."