The ATM Industry Association wants ATM deployers to exercise more caution when discarding decommissioned machines.
Not only can the old ATMs contain the same sorts of materials that make disposing of other sorts of electronic items hazardous for the environment, they also contain technology that unscrupulous people want to use to learn to defeat existing ATMs, the industry said in a recent white paper on the topic.
“With over 2.2 million ATMs already installed worldwide, a figure forecast to increase to 3 million by 2015, this presents the ATM industry with a challenge on a huge scale. What happens to the thousands of machines which become obsolete each year,” the international association asked in "Best Practices for Decommissioning ATMs."
“And how does the industry prevent machines from falling into the wrong hands where they could potentially be used for criminal forms of reverse engineering?”
The association noted recent media reports about organized criminals trying to obtain discarded ATMs from junkyards in the U.S. Criminals seek this information to both improve their efforts to skim card data from unsuspecting consumers through “skimming” operations that modify ATMs and efforts to simply hack the machines.
