Hackers dispense cash without a card from ATM machines

Hackers have managed to infect the ATM machines to dispense cash without a card. Scary as it is, they have managed to infect the malware and dispense wads of cash out of an ATM machine directly from each cash cassette.

Securelist reported that all the hacker needs to do is infect his malware or code to the Windows machine inside the ATM machine by booting it from a CD/DVD drive.

Kaspersky, a well-known and reputed computer security company has managed to detect the malware that affects ATM machines running Microsoft Windows.

At the time of their investigation, they found the malware active on more than 50 ATMs at banking institutions across Eastern Europe. T malware has managed to spread to several other countries, including the US, India and China.  

The hacker has programmed the malware to use various techniques to avoid detection by security firms. It gets active only at a specific time during the night.  It uses a key based on a random seed for every session, and without this very key, interacting with the infected ATM is impossible.

When the correct key is entered, the malware then displays the exact information on how much cash is available in each and every cassette of the machine. Then it allows the hacker to withdraw around 40 notes from the selected cassette(s).

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