On the plane to Las Vegas for the annual pilgrimage to hacker con in the desert. Defcon, now in its 17th year, has been a chance for me to renew my batteries since I first started attending at Defcon 8. This has now become a chance for me to interact with kindred spirits in the industry as well as the “smarter than me” crowd that will be putting on some great presentations. One presentation that I won’t be able to see is Barnaby Jack’s ATM presentation. The interesting part was that he was apparently going to jackpot the ATM on stage during his talk. Sadly, the ATM vendor lawyered up.
The reason I was thinking about this presentation is due to a chance encounter on my flight. A person sitting with me started to engage me in conversation. I tend to be quiet (no, really) and while travelling. I more often than not just jam my headphones on and tune out my surroundings. A chance to relax. But, not today. As we talked my seat mate started to talk about various projects that they had worked on over the years. Now retired, the need to chat about the “war stories” seems to be a little too much to ignore.
I oblige.
As the stories unfold we discover a mutual past and coworkers/projects that we had been 6 degrees from. Then one conversation touched on a particular banking crime from the 80s. It reminded me of “Catch Me If You Can”. Apparently some character had gone around to banks in the Toronto and taken some deposit slips. Innocuous on the face of it. However, this guy then changed the routing numbers on the slips to set the any deposits to route into his own bank account. Then he apparently printed out the slips en masse and then took them bank to the bank branches.
Now bear in mind this was the 80s. No one in the branches even took notice of the person dropping the new slips into the racks. For two and a half weeks people all over the city of Toronto paid into this person’s account.
While the criminal may have shown some ingenuity in the execution he, blew it when he let the scheme run. Brilliant in its simplicity but, greed makes criminals dumb. Still an interesting tale.
A shame we won’t be able to see Barnaby’s talk. I’m imagining there will be more stories about ATM’s jack potting as the ne’er do wells exploit the bug(s). Sadly, the bad guys won’t be hampered by the lawyers…at least not for a presentation to help people understand the problem.
(Image used under CC from Steve Rhodes‘ Flickr Stream)
