Security News New ATMii Malware Can Empty ATMs

[silversurfer]

A newly detailed malware targeting automated teller machines (ATM) allows attackers to completely drain available cash, Kaspersky Lab researchers have discovered.

Dubbed ATMii, the threat was first spotted in April this year, featuring an injector module (exe.exe) and the module to be injected (dll.dll). Actors using the malware need direct access to a target ATM (either over the network or physically) to install it.

During analysis, the security researchers discovered that the injector, an unprotected command line application, was written in Visual C with a fake compilation timestamp of four years ago. The malware features support for a Windows version more recent than Windows XP, which is the platform most ATMs run.

The injector targets the proprietary ATM software process called atmapp.exe to inject the second module into it. However, the injector appears fairly poorly written, being dependent on several parameters and catching an exception if no parameter is given.

The supported parameters include /load, which attempts to inject dll.dll into atmapp.exe, /cmd, which creates or updates the C:\ATM\c.ini file (which is used by the injected DLL to read commands), and /unload, which attempts to unload injected library from atmapp.exe process, while restoring its state.

Based on available commands, the malware can scan for the CASH_UNIT XFS service, can dispense a desired amount of cash (where the “amount” and “currency” are used as parameters), retrieve information about ATM cash cassettes and write it to the log file, and remove the C:\ATM\c.ini file.

The injected module tries to find the ATM’s CASH_UNIT service id, as it cannot function without this service. After finding it, it stores the result and starts passing all further calls to a function in charge of reading, parsing, and executing the commands from the C:\ATM\c.ini file.

“ATMii is yet another example of how criminals can use legitimate proprietary libraries and a small piece of code to dispense money from an ATM. Some appropriate countermeasures against such attacks are default-deny policies and device control. The first measure prevents criminals from running their own code on the ATM’s internal PC, while the second measure will prevent them from connecting new devices, such as USB sticks,” Kaspersky concludes.

 

[Deleted member 65228]

You can protect the memory at the targeted processes to prevent attacks like code injection, and then ATM malware which works like the one described above would become mitigated without a zero-day exploit/work-around for the mitigation implementations, making it a whole lot trickier for malware authors. Not sure why ATM vendors don't already do this?

 

[Local Host]

You can protect the memory at the targeted processes to prevent attacks like code injection, and then ATM malware which works like the one described above would become mitigated without a zero-day exploit/work-around for the mitigation implementations, making it a whole lot trickier for malware authors. Not sure why ATM vendors don't already do this?

For the same reason they still run on Windows XP.

 

[tim one]

One of the most effective techniques to physically violate an ATM is to use an ATM key for access the hardware, and then inserting a bootable CD in one of the CD/DVD drive, so a criminal can load any operating system by using a tool based on Linux, which loads the operating system by searching, on the local disk, the Windows installation that manages the ATM.

At this point, the installation disk loads the malware on the hard disk, changing the necessary registry key to load it into memory at every boot and disabling any whitelisting protection of the processes, active on many of these machines.

Someone might say: "Hey but there are the surveillance cameras!"

I can tell you that rarely the banks look at the recordings of these cameras.... no, indeed...they look at these video but just after the hacker attack.:X3: