Reverse Engineering An ATM Card Skimmer

While vacationing in Bali, [Matt South] walked into a nice, secure, air-conditioned cubicle housing an ATM. Knowing card skimmers are the bane of every traveller, [Matt] did the sensible thing and jiggled the card reader and the guard that hides your PIN when punching it into the numeric keypad. [Matt] found the PIN pad shield came off very easily and was soon the rightful owner of a block of injection molded plastic, a tiny camera, and a few bits of electronics.

The first thing that tipped [Matt] off to the existence of electronics in this brick of plastic was a single switch and a port with four contacts. These four pins could be anything, but guessing it was USB [Matt] eventually had access to a drive filled with 11GB of video taken from inside this PIN pad shield.

An investigation of the videos and the subsequent teardown of the device itself revealed exactly what you would expect. A tiny pinhole camera, probably taken from a ‘spy camera’ device, takes video whenever movement is detected. Oddly, there’s an audio track to these videos, but [Matt] says that makes sense; the scammers can hear the beeps made by the ATM with every keypress and correlate them to each button pressed.

Of course, the black hats behind this skimmer need two things: the card number, and the PIN. This tiny spy cam only gets the PIN, and there wasn’t a device over or in the card slot in the ATM. How did the scammers get the card number, then? Most likely, the thieves are getting the card number by sniffing the ATM’s connection to the outside world. It’s a bit more complex than sticking a magnetic card reader over the ATM’s card slot, but it’s harder to detect.

Filed under: security hacks

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