As banks and financial services increasingly secure their systems to keep their money safe, the level of complexity for money theft continues to grow.
Let's recall the case where Russian criminals found a new way to steal around 252 million rubles, an amount that translates to $3.8 million dollars from five anonymous banks. They managed to do it using a technique called reverse ATM attack.
According to Russia's secret services, the technique of reverse attack on ATMs (reverse ATM attack) is capable of exploiting the vulnerabilities of the international money transfer system, allowing criminals to steal large sums of money with particular ease. Nevertheless, according to the secret services, these criminals could crack it for much more money if they had more patience.
Let's see how this technique works:
Simple depositors who work for the criminals deposit amounts of 5.000, 10.000 and 30.000 rubles into certified accounts, and subsequently, they will withdraw this amount from an ATM. Then, they will take the receipt from the ATM, which details the payment reference number as well as the amount received from them.
Once this process is successfully completed, the information is sent to the hackers, who in turn will use the data and gain access to thousands of PoS (point of sale) terminals, which are primarily located in the USA and the Czech Republic. By doing this, they are able to create a ‘reversal operation’ on the terminal that deceives the bank, making it believe that the cash withdrawal was essentially cancelled.
At the point of sale terminal, it will appear that the money was either refunded or the withdrawal could not be completed for some reason, while the banks will show that the withdrawal has been cancelled. The money is returned to the account, even though the criminals have already taken it from the ATM.
This process continues until the ATM is completely dried out, and they move on to the next one. This explains how the criminals managed to steal so much money in such a short period of time.
