Hacking hackers is not a good idea, as the hackers who tried an ATM scam found last week. Attendees at the Black Hat and Defcon security conferences in Las Vegas spotted suspicious ATMs and alerted authorities.
Now Las Vegas Police and the Secret Service are hunting for the fraudsters who tried to steal money with a fake ATM in the Riviera Hotel Casino, which hosted Defcon. Unfortunately for the crooks, the security experts attending the hacker conferences are familiar with the tactics used by cyber thieves.
A conference organizer known as Priest inspected the fake ATM machine without a bank name and discovered a camera behind the dark screen. Reportedly, the fake ATM logged the ATM numbers and PIN codes of anyone using it, making it easy to create counterfeit cards.
Priest said that type of fake ATM machine is common at gas stations.
Authorities were also investigating reports about an ATM at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino that debited Defcon presenter Chris Paget’s account $200 without giving him the money.
Ironically, an ATM vendor reportedly pressured Juniper Networks to cancel a conference talk by Barnaby Jack on security flaws in ATM machines using Windows CE. The address was called Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines.