New Delhi: The hardships of the common man arising due to the implementation of Demonetisation policy may increase if security experts are to be believed. The experts have warned of serious hacking in the ATMs, which form sort of monetary lifeline for people.
The warning comes from a top executive of Intel Security, a dedicated security technology company. The American security software company with its McAfee line of products is the world's largest and the concern raised by it may prove to be challenging for our Cyber experts.
The Demonetisation move has brought the people “on their toes” literally as they struggle to get their own hard earned money from banks and are even forced to cut down on their expenses. As if these were not enough for the common man, this new vulnerability of ATMs to hacking is expected to add to their woes.
The ATMs are not the only levels at which Banks' security may be breached. The Data Centre, the Network, the Mobile Banking are the other levels through which a breach is possible. There have been some major incidences of such breaches in the recent past in foreign countries. For example, malicious software used by some hacker group known as Cobalt targeted the ATMs across Europe remotely and programmed the machines to dispense huge amount of cash last month.
In India, earlier this year the malware infestation in Hitachi Payment Services caused what can be said as India's biggest data infringement of financial sector. About 30-32 lakh debit cards were blocked, of which the cards issued by State Bank of India, HDFC, Axis Bank, Yes Bank and ICICI Bank were worst affected.
In this circumstances, Banks in India need to gear up to prevent such cyber attacks by ensuring authentication at multiple levels of transactions. The data security needs to be in place and for that it is necessary to follow standard encryption for banking industry. Many experts are of the view that Banks can enhance the security of the transactions at ATMs by adopting EMV (Europay MasterCard and Visa) chip and pin enabled card acceptance and processing. The EMV is a standard technology globally accepted for payment cards, terminals and ATMs.
Atul Singh, the Regional Director- Banking and Transport (Indian Subcontinent) at Gemalto, a digital security giant feels that the replacement of the magnetic-stripe cards issued by banks should be replaced by EMV chip cards at their earliest. In an interview with IANS he expressed that this move would be beneficial for banks, as well as, for the consumers.
Mr. Anand Ramamoorthy, the Managing Director of the Intel (South Asia) said “The ATM today is an easy target for hackers to hit a network”. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his recent tweet, might have urged the people to “embrace e-banking, mobile banking and more such technology”, but Mr. Ramamoorthy thinks that the popularity of mobile banking would invite higher risks. In his opinion, people need to be aware as they get more digitised since digitisation has many serious implications. He further added that Intel Security has developed an “Embedded App” control which will protect the ATM and the network it is connected to, simultaneously, to deal with cyber attacks in future.
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