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HACKERS ARE EMPTYING ATMS WITH A SINGLE DRILLED HOLE AND $15 WORTH OF GEAR
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https://www.wired.com/2017/04/hackers-em...orth-gear/    AUTHOR: ANDY GREENBERG. ANDY GREENBERG SECURITY  DATE OF PUBLICATION: 04.03.17.
04.03.17
 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 3:30 PM.
3:30 PM
HACKERS ARE EMPTYING ATMS WITH A SINGLE DRILLED HOLE AND $15 WORTH OF GEAR

BARBARA ALPER/GETTY IMAGES
NOT SO LONG ago, enterprising thieves who wanted to steal the entire contents of an ATM had to blow it up. Today, a more discreet sort of cash-machine burglar can walk away with an ATM’s stash and leave behind only a tell-tale three-inch hole in its front panel.

Researchers from the Russian security firm Kaspersky on Monday detailed a new ATM-emptying attack, one that mixes digital savvy with a very precise form of physical penetration. Kaspersky’s team has even reverse engineered and demonstrated the attack, using only a portable power drill and a $15 homemade gadget that injects malicious commands to trigger the machine’s cash dispenser. And though they won’t name the ATM manufacturer or the banks affected, they warn that thieves have already used the drill attack across Russia and Europe, and that the technique could still leave ATMs around the world vulnerable to having their cash safes disemboweled in a matter of minutes.

“We wanted to know: To what extent can you control the internals of the ATM with one drilled hole and one connected wire? It turns out we can do anything with it,” says Kaspersky researcher Igor Soumenkov, who presented the research at the company’s annual Kaspersky Analyst Summit. “The dispenser will obey and dispense money, and it can all be done with a very simple microcomputer.”

Drill, Baby, Drill
For Kaspersky, the mystery of the drilled ATMs began last fall, when a bank client showed them an emptied cash machine whose only evidence of tampering was a golf-ball sized hole next to its PIN pad. To hide their tidy surgery, the thieves had even covered the entry point with a sticker. Eventually, the researchers learned of close to a dozen similar ATM heists. And when police arrested a suspect in one of the cases, they found a laptop, along with a cable he’d apparently snaked into the PIN pad hole. “Just a laptop, some wiring, and a hole in the ATM, that’s it,” says Soumenkov.

Kaspersky’s researchers already had the same model of ATM in their test lab, one that’s been in wide use since the 1990s. They removed its front panel to find a serial port that would have been accessible from the thieves’ hole. It connected to a wire that ran through the ATM’s entire internal bus of components, from the computer that controlled its user interface to the cash dispenser. Then the researchers spent five solid weeks with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer, decoding the protocol of the ATM’s internal communications from raw electric signals. They found that the machine’s only encryption was a weak XOR cipher they were able to easily break, and that there was no real authentication between the machine’s modules.
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