ATMs vulnerable to frauds since 3 years

On Friday government woke up as 74% of the cash dispensers are processing on outdated software and are prone to fraud and lack basic security features. The automated teller machines (ATMs) run by public sector banks may be easily accessible to frauds as they are running on outdated software by leaving it vulnerable to cyber attacks.The government, however, did not disclose details of such ATMs that were run by private sector lenders. Most ATMs in India Are Easy Targets for Hackers & Malware Attacks.

A question arises on why do people wait for such attacks to happen to bring about a change? A huge number of machines in the country are operated by public sector players, state run-banks control close to 70% of the business, comprising lending and deposits, and the report says, government telling Parliament that close to 89% of the ATMs belong to this category. The development came at a point when several ATM fraud incidents have been reported in different parts of the country.

Currently, India has over 2 lakh ATMs and approximately 70 per cent of them still run on Windows XP - which Microsoft itself stopped supporting in 2014. Most of the machines are running on Windows XP which cannot run many of the sophisticated security measures, where advanced security programmes cannot be loaded. Banks were going slow in upgrading the systems....Read More