TARGETED HACKING
7 August 2009
Two ATM incidents reported from Vegas
Fraudsters who rigged ATM machines at hotel venues in
Las Vegas last week appeared to be targeting their
"white hat" colleagues in the business on one incident,
where the venue was the scene of the Black Hat USA and
Defcon hacker conference.
Wired.com reports that
a malicious ATM kiosk was positioned in the conference
centre of the Riviera Hotel Casino, capturing data from
an unknown number of hackers attending the conference
before someone became suspicious.
An organiser
for the conference said security authorities seized the
device, but little information on its nature has been
released. Witnesses said the kiosk was well-placed to
avoid surveillance cameras.
“In any casino
anything that is considered that high-value has a
camera,” said Brian Markus, CEO of Aries Security who
saw the machine, “They placed it where there were no
[hotel] cameras visibly watching that exact spot.”
Markus said it was clear to him the ATM was fake
when he looked at the smoked glass on the front of the
machine. When he beamed a flashlight through the glass,
instead of seeing a camera behind it, he saw that a PC
had been set up to siphon card data.
The ATM had
been placed right outside the hotel’s security office.
Over at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino a more
conventional ATM modus operandi was in place, widespread
press reports indicate. The U.S. Secret Service is
apparently investigating this major ATM hack that stole
money from users' bank accounts from multiple machines.
The ATM scam first came to light when security
researcher Chris Paget lost $200 to an ATM machine over
the weekend at the hotel. Paget, who kept a running log
of the events on his Twitter feed, alerted authorities
after the machine took his credentials and debited his
account, but didn't spit out any cash. He said in his
Twitter feed that he met other visitors who had lost
money in a similar fashion, one of them reporting a loss
of $1 000.
Paget was able to cancel his ATM card
and reverse the transaction through his bank, he
tweeted.
Again, little firm information had been
released by investigators, and it herefore not clear
whether the machines were rigged with malware or card
skimmers.
Paget opined to reporters that the
scam could be an inside job of some sort. "I believe it
was either malware or an inside job - there were no
visible skimmers," he said in an interview. "The machine
was operating perfectly - it answered all the steps, and
you could even hear the gears whirring when it was
supposed to dispense the cash."
But given that
Paget was unable to examine the machines closely, he
says for now it's all "speculation."
Online Casino News Courtesy of
Infopowa
More news here.
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