Interesting AP story on stealing $1,000,000s by hacking bank's back-end systems to harvest ATM PINs.
http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2008/07/02/atm-citibank.html "Hackers are targeting the ATM system's infrastructure, which is increasingly built on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system..." "They could have gained administrative access to the machines, which means they had carte blanche to grab information through a flaw in the network or by figuring out those computers' passwords. Or it's possible they installed a piece of malicious software on a banking server to capture unencrypted PINs as they passed through." This is more data for the chicken-or-egg question about whether MS's systems get hacked so much because they are so popular or because they are so easy. Here we have an existing population of systems so the number of them did not significantly change. What changed was the proportion of MS's systems being used. Hence more MS = more hacks. ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
