As the growth of ATM fraud increases around the world exponentially in recent times, anti-malware researchers are keen to solve a crisis in the making.
The bad guys are getting smarter, they're growing distinctively more sophisticated , warns Sergey Golovanov, senior malware Analyst for Kaspersky Lab in Moscow, who is speaking at the 10th Virus Analyst summit in Croatia. Golovanov is an expert on the cyber criminal groups who utilise ATM fraud. And in his work, he's seen some interesting trends pop up.
The problem says Golovanov, is not that security experts aren't looking for a way to solve the multitude of ATM security flaws; it's that their hands are tied. And then placed in a trench of concrete, so to speak.
"We haven't got very far yet...the systems used by banks are closed and they are not going to let outsiders access those systems", insists Golovanov, conjuring up a world where ATMs become easier to break into, because the good guys can't inspect the systems at the root of the cause.
Some ATMs in Russia and other Eastern localities have been found to infected with internal malware scripts that can capture the users details from within, without physical skimming props; a go-to cash making machine that spurts out easy money for criminal networks.
Customer details can be printed on a piece of paper at the ATM or on older machines, the ATM can be programmed to pop out in a handy taking for the bad guys.
And you don't have to very smart to pull these kind of scams off either. The surprising finding from a recent case where such malware was found in a machine was that the bad guys lacked the kind of intellect and planning normally associated with cyber criminals.
"They weren't very smart", says Golonavov, aware that the next group of people to build on this level of technology will be much more informed and sophisticated.
These 'internal' ATM threats are a much trickier proposition to solve however; if the experts can't get access to the ATMs for inspection, then the chances of doing anything about it are almost impossible.
More so, ATM malware attacks pose a wider threat for the rest of the world. It's quite foreseeable that we'll see more of these internal ATM attacks popping up around the globe more often. "Yes, it could easily happen", argues Golovanov, in a warning to ATM users.