Demand up for Anti Skimming Software, NCR Says

NCR Corp. says it has sold more than 50,000 licenses of software to prevent ATM skimming, including by insiders. Many kinds of insider fraud are understood to be growing during the crisis.

NCR has offered Solidcore for APTRA"a version of Solidcore Systems fraud prevention software designed specially for ATMs—for about 5 years, Jeff Dudash, an NCR spokesperson, says. Solidcore of Cupertino, Calif., secures point-of-sale and other devices that connect with data centers.

NCR's offering "is the only proven security solution to prevent malware on ATMs," Dudash told BS&T. These attacks, in which corrupted technicians install ATM-skimming software in automated teller machines, are also known as "inside out attacks".

BS&T recently reported that Germany saw a 70 percent increase in skimming attacks in 2008, many of them facilitated by technicians acting for crime gangs. Insiders with special access—an alternative to criminals who stick external skimming devices into ATM machines—were behind a recent spate of account fraud in Russia.

Solidcore for APTRA is designed to detect any unauthorized code running on an ATM and so to pre-empt threats. "NCR recognized that the underlying risk to any system was unauthorized software, particularly the growing risk of insider fraud," said Rosen Sharma, chief technology officer for Solidcore, in a statement. "NCR combined its awareness of IT threats with an in-depth knowledge of financial industry delivery channels, such as the ATM, and tailored the Solidcore runtime control and white-listing technology to the unique 24/7 needs of these self-service channels to protect them from unauthorized code."

NCR of Dayton, Oh., is one of the world's top ATM suppliers.