It’s not happy days for Diebold, the company behind ATMs and electronic voting. Its e-voting machines have been the source of much controversy — earlier this month it withdrew its suit against people who had posted leaked documents about alleged security breaches in the software. Now its automatic teller machines have been hit — by viruses.
Wired reports that ATMs at two banks running Microsoft Windows software were infected by a computer virus in August, the maker of the machines said. The ATM infections, first reported by SecurityFocus.com, are believed to be the first of a computer virus wiggling directly onto cash machines. (The Register said in January that the Slammer worm brought down 13,000 Bank of America ATMs, but they weren’t directly infected: the worm infected database servers on the same network, spewing so much traffic the cash machines couldn’t process transactions.)
But how can an ATM get infected? SecurityFocus says that while “ATMs typically sit on private networks or VPNs, the most serious worms in the last year have demonstrated that supposedly-isolated networks often have undocumented connections to the Internet, or can fall to a piece of malicious code inadvertently carried beyond the firewall on a laptop computer.” In other words: the folk who write worms are smarter than we are.