The theft of Citibank ATM PINs is in the news again as it appears that indictments have been handed down on the three suspects. This case will be interesting to watch, to see what the fallout will be. It is not still really clear if the PINs were leaked in transit, or if the clearing house servers were breached.

There are a couple of things about this story that I still find amusing. The first is that Fiserv, the company that operates the majority of the network, is pointing fingers at Cardtronics Inc. The quote by the Fiserv representative “Fiserv is confident in the integrity and security of our system” is great. They both manage elements of the ‘system’. When it comes down to it, this is like two parties who are standing in a puddle of gasoline, accusing each other of lighting a match. It won’t matter who is at fault when they both go up in flames. In the public mind, no one is going to care, and they will be blamed equally and quite possibly both go out of business if their security was shown to be grossly lacking.

My second though on this subject was, once you breach the ‘system’, you have to get the money out. In this case, it has been reported that over $2M was ‘illegally gained’. If the average account is hacked for $200.00, we are talking about at least 10,000 separate ATM withdrawals. That is a lot of time spent at the 7-11! But seriously, that is a lot of time to spend making ATM withdrawals. I figure that they way they got caught is that the thief’s picture keept turning up on security cameras … otherwise this is a difficult crime to detect and catch.

I also got to thinking about ATMs and the entire authentication process is not much more than basic two factor authentication combined with some simple behavioral checks at the back end. The security of these networks is really not all that advanced. Typically PIN codes are four digits in length, and it really does not make a lot of sense to use hash algorithms given the size of the PIN and the nature of the communications protocol. And while it requires some degree of technical skill, the card itself can be duplicated, making a fairly weak two factor system. Up until a couple years ago, DES was still the typical encryption algorithm in use, and only parts of the overall transaction processing systems keep the data encrypted. Many of the ATMs are not on private networks, but utilize the public Internet and airwaves. Given the amount of money and the number of transactions that are processed around the world, it is really quite astonishing how well the system as a whole holds up.

Finally, while I have been known to bash Microsoft for various security miscues over the years, it seems somewhat specious to state “Hackers are targeting the ATM system’s infrastructure, which is increasingly built on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.” Of course they are targetting the infrastructure; that is the whole point of electronic fraud. They probably meant the back end processing infrastructure. And why mention Windows? Windows may make familiarity with the software easier; this case does not show that any MS product was at fault for the breach. Throwing that into the story seems like they are trying to cast blame on MS software without any real evidence.

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