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Verizon has released its eighth annual Data Breach Investigations Report, and – no surprise – banks are at the top of the list of companies besieged by cyber threats.
April 23
NCR (NCR) has unveiled a product to deter theft from automated teller machines.
The global technology company said Wednesday that its Skimming Protection Solution, or SPS, can prevent so-called skimming attacks, in which a thief installs a card slot on an ATM with the goal of swiping the data embedded in the magnetic strip on customers cards and using the information to drain money from the customers' accounts.
Skimming accounted for a bulk of the instances of fraud that banks battled last year, according to a
In a typical skimming attack, a thief installs a device on the ATM that can read information from the customer's card the same way the ATM reads the information. Criminals often install a camera at the ATM that helps them pick up the customer's personal identification number as the user enters it on the ATM keypad.
Criminals match the magnetic strip information with the PIN to create a clone of the customer's card.
SPS consists of two components: a hardware module with an electromagnetic sensor that can jam attempts to grab data from cards, and software that can detect and report in real time attempts to tamper with or disable the sensor.
Banks can retrofit NCR's SelfServ ATMs with SPS without having to take the machines out of service, according to the company.
Andy Heyman, an NCR senior vice president for financial services, said in a press release that skimming can add roughly $2,500 annually to the cost of each machine in a bank's ATM network. "Our goal with SPS is to reduce these hard costs to financial institutions while helping them fulfill a major part of their brand promise around confidence and security," Heyman added.
