Secret Service Warns of ‘Periscope’ Skimmers
Summary: The U.S. Secret Service is warning banks and ATM owners about "periscope skimming," a probe that connects directly to an ATM's internal circuit board to capture card data from the magnetic stripe, with the first known U.S. case found Aug. 19, 2016 at a Greenwich, Conn. ATM and a second found Sept. 3 in Pennsylvania. A Connecticut financial crimes task force alert says the devices can stay powered inside the ATM for up to 14 days and store up to 32,000 card numbers, and that in both cases thieves opened the machines with a key via "top-hat" entry and glued the probe to the card reader frame.
Why it matters: A single hidden probe holding 32,000 card numbers for up to two weeks means one compromised machine can expose an entire customer base before anyone notices, and the thieves got in with a key rather than a exploit.
Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗
- Topics
- Data Breaches
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