ATMs new ‘sweet spot’ for cyber criminals in India
By Prempal Singh
Each time when people are making serpentine queues at ATM machine to withdraw cash owing to demonetization, a new report said that cyber attacks on ATMs will rise in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in 2017.
“We have seen a huge give attention to ATM problems in the APAC region, including in India. ATMs in underdeveloped countries are particularly vulnerable as those countries still, have old ATM software and are running Or windows XP. This makes them the perfect target for an easier score, ” US-based cyber security company FireEye claimed in the “2017 Security Landscape-Asia Pacific Edition” report. Recently, some leading Indian banks blocked charge cards that were affected (the numbers ran into millions) in one of the financial sector’s biggest data breaches.
The SBI (State Bank of India), HDFC Bank, ICICI, Axis Bank and Yes Bank were among banking institutions which reported several of their customers’ debit cards being compromised carrying out a malware-related security breach within an ATM network. The SBI blocked practically 6,00,000 debit cards.
This arrived on the heels of malware attacks and internet threats that afflicted countries like Japan and Bangladesh this season. “With the continuing rise in ransomware activities across the globe, spiritual organizations may unexpectedly become a target of internet criminals in 2017, adding that much of the threat activity in the Asia-Pacific region is from China, ” FireEye continuing. While talking about opportunities in security that firms will make in 2017, FireEye predicts organizations making significant investments in the execution of orchestration and software in 2017.
“Organizations wanting to simplify everything in 2017 will set their places on integration. One pane of glass for all security needs will drastically increase the organization’s security posture and-and have absolutely companies the true value of all of the products they have acquired”, the report noted{Generally|Generally
On the whole, the proliferation of cyber-physical systems and the Internet of Things (IoT) would present new opportunities for adversaries to abuse their connectivity and cause interruption at scale for a bigger payoff. “The blend of tools such as ransomware with increased formalized dubious (SaaS) software-as-a-service franchised business models will end up a more attractive and lucrative option for criminals with the appropriate skill sets and motivations”, FireEye pointed out.
Lately, a hacker group called Cobalt targeted ATMs across Europe and remotely assaulted the machines using harmful software that manipulated the systems which led the machines to automatically distribute a large amount of cash.
Source: Indianexpress.com