We’ve all heard the warnings about ATMs being “modified” with card skimmers in order to steal your details and siphon money from your account. But that doesn’t mean they are easy to spot, or in fact how much trouble criminals go to so as to ensure your details and PIN are logged.
Brian Krebs from KrebsonSecurity has posted details of a fairly new ATM Skimmer that was discovered at a bank in San Fernando Valley. As you can see, from the front you really can’t tell this is a fake card reading slot, and as long as it is attached to a machine that has a similar color scheme, most people wouldn’t give it a second thought.
Look around the back though, and you see the kit required to make this scam work. Those big batteries we all rely on to power our smartphones for hours every day apparently also work very well when powering a skimmer. In this case one is powering the circuitry to record and store the details of an inserted card.
You can also see a pinhole on the right side of the casing. Behind that is mounted a camera which, when activated, records the key presses of the person who just slid their card into the machine. The footage of the PIN entry, coupled with the card details, give the criminal everything he/she needs to commit fraud.
A big battery and a few gigabytes of flash memory and this kit could collect hundreds of card details over the course of a few days. The skimmer also seems to be from an organized person (gang?) who is doing this on a large scale–that “5? etched on the inside of the case suggests there’s a number of these skimmers deployed in the area.
Read more at KrebsonSecurity
