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Diebold Marries VMs with ATMs to Secure Banking Data

Posted by timothy on from the do-you-machine-take-this-data dept.

gManZboy writes "Automatic teller machine maker Diebold has taken a novel approach to protecting bank customer data: virtualization. Virtualized ATMs store all customer data on central servers, rather than the ATM itself, making it difficult for criminals to steal data from the machines. In places including Brazil, customer data has been at risk when thieves pulled or dynamited ATMs out of their settings and drove off with them. With threats increasing worldwide at many retail points of sale, such as supermarket checkout counters and service station gas pumps, Diebold needed to guarantee the security of customer data entered at the 50,000 ATMs that it manages. Diebold last year partnered with VMware to produce a zero-client ATM. No customer data is captured and stored on the ATM itself." Perhaps Diebold should take the same approach to vote-tabulating machines.

2 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I can't believe that even Diebold by Midnight_Falcon · · Score: 4, Informative
    Don't use your credit card at a restaurant then. Almost all point of sale systems cache locally to some extent, often for up to a month!

    These systems were all built with bad network communication in mind -- verifying over phones, etc, which causes them to have to store this credit card data (PAN data). Because modern systems are just upgrades on these old codebases, little has changed but to give it the bare amount of encryption/etc for PCI compliance, which is routinely ignored by small businesses.

  2. Re:Are you sure? by lucm · · Score: 4, Informative

    I always thought that when the balance was not available meant that the ATM was out of paper. It's the only time I don't get a receipt. I have my profile set to automatically generate a receipt.

    It depends on your local ATM I guess, but just for fun, next time you can't get a balance before withdrawing, try to take out more money than you have (if the ATM limit is high enough) and you'll have the answer. They will put a negative balance in your bank account and call you to complain a few days later.

    This happened to a friend of mine who was sure the ATM was broken so he kept taking money out. Tsk tsk. Beating the bank - not possible!

    --
    lucm, indeed.