A former Romanian ATM skimmer, currently at the beginning of a five-year sentence, is asking for absolution for his crimes. And to make up for this participation in the annual billion dollar trade of stealing other people's card data, he's come up with a system that could eliminate the very crime he facilitated.
It's called the Secure Revolving System (SRS), and it's installable on virtually any ATM.
A typical ATM provides users with a slot to slide their cards into lengthwise, allowing the ATM to read the strip's data sequentially. And that's a security risk. Scammers, with look-alike ATM faces and magnetic stripe readers, can simply install a skimmer over a slot and have customer banking data, literally, fed to them for later use.
But the SRS works differently than traditional ATM readers. The device is installed over the slot of any given ATM, and has users place their card into a holder widthwise - instead of lengthwise - into the device. The device then rotates the card before inserting it into the ATM and returning the card to its owner in the reverse manner. Since magnetic strips need to be read sequentially, and the best a magnetic strip could do in this case is to read only a portion, the device effectively renders any skimmer useless.
The designer, Vaetin Boanta, 33, came up with the SRS during his trial for ATM skimming in 2009. In an interview with Reuters, Boanta explained that he felt genuinely remorseful for helping to build the devices after he was caught, and wanted to help make amends.
"When I got caught I became happy. This liberation opened the way to working for the good side," Boanta said in an interview.
A company called MB telecom funded Boanta to develop the device. It's currently being marketed by Gnosis Kernel.
Romania is a particularly hacker-prone area of the world, coming in right behind China as the world's biggest hacking center, according to Verizon's 2013 data breach report. The reason: former communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu pushed for strong computer research and education. The was executed in a violent overthrow in 1989.
