ATMs Face Deadline to Upgrade From Windows XP

Lady Fitzgerald said:

ATMs and gas pumps have been known to have skimmers attached to them. Often, a hidden camera will be placed so people punching in PINs can be watched. The ATM skimmers are obvious if you are familiar with what the ATM normally looks like. The gas pump skimmers can be sneakier if the crook has a key and can install the skimmer inside. Those keys are easy to come by. I used to have one when I worked for a convenience store. It would have been no trick to have made a copy of it.

Or the case of the swopped over pinpad as per McDonalds a while again, (Not sure if it was Mc's or someone similar)
Whereas the pinpad was changed, while the staff was not looking then retrieved at a later date, again while the staff we distracted. then the info was pulled out of the pinpad.
The pinpads were logging accounts and pin numbers.

On any decent system a changed pinpad would be tagged by the admins for access privileges. ie won't do nothing until it's reg'd.

Whether it's dialup or adsl or dedicated line, it should be a registered line/line number or it will have to go though a variety of firewalls, usually Linux based. (Or really should be Linux based)
And even then, anything that can access banks has to be a closed system..... ie no external/internet access, even through firewalls.

Which embedded O/S is irrelevant, it only has drivers for what it's built to do are installed, any other extras should/would be tagged for investigation by the admins, and not allowed until given the rights from the security/network admins.

As to plug in an extra usb device, as above.

smarteyeball said:

You thought XP was bad?

My neighbour used to be an ATM tech ~4-5 years ago and some of those ATMs he dealt with were still using Win 3.1 ...

If I recall, I believe Windows 3.1 was officially still in support until fairly recently for embedded applications such as ATMs and the in-flight entertainment systems of airliners.