I used to work in a company that maintains and repair the atm of most major national & commercial banks. (i only did the electronics parts and mechanical parts, never the software since i've never encountered a trouble before that is not caused by a hardware failure, ie. repair the cause of error (mostly mechanical) and the system goes back to normal). all the machines under our care are either running msdos (old text only display machines) and mswindow (newer graphics based machines). until i left the company a few years ago to settle here in cdo i've never yet encountered a single machine not running an ms os. maybe its because the version installed in an atm is a very stable and passed the required standard. unless gamit nila pirated eh. hahaha
for info lang of those who doesn't know yet, an atm machine is just like a typical pc setup. it has a microcomputer inside (just like our ordinary cpu), a printer (dotmatrix or thermal), the keypad is still plugged in the keyboard rs232 socket, a monitor plugged in the video card (vga and some still use rca), the only difference and missing in our home pc setup is the money dispensing mechanism. as you may guess now, its not so special afterall. not so hightech and very far away from rocket science. and i dont think it can be hacked from using the keypad alone. think of the keypad as the num pad in our ordinary keyboard. they only took away the rest of the keys but the encoder chip remains the same. you can only input the numbers when asked. no equivalent keys for cntrl, alt, shift, tab, etc. just a few function keys for the user to choose an option. what can you do with numbers keys w/o those special keys? well, maybe im wrong. i saw a movie once upon a time...d.a.r.y.l... implanted w a micro chip in his brain, he thinks like a computer and can even command a computer to do his bidding like an atm dispensing everything with only a few keystrokes. but contrary to this, atm nowadays can only dispense so much in a day. it has a guaranteed (and almost) fail proof bill dispensing counters and mechanism. it cannot dispense more than the preset amount w/o triggering a failure alarm after w/c the machine freezes and inform the bank officer in charge of its status. response time is almost immediate depending on the error given (atm's have very high priority level) even during night time except when no money is left where it will only be replenished during banking hours for security reasons. this is what i know from years back. maybe somebody can pull it off nowadays. you can try but chances are you'll fry pag nasakpan ka. try and try until you die? hehehe -- Powered by Outblaze
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