Can anyone figure out where a year went here? He plead guilty in April 2010. Was he really just sentenced in May 2011?
BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#42One would wonder if there were any code reviews in place or not? Any code that has monetary effects has to go through a series of code reviews (saying from my experience working with a client in banking industry) and tests. I would be curious as to how the 'bug' went undetected until deployment!
Any code that has monetary effects has to go through a series of code reviews The article reported that he installed malware on select ATMs. I acknowledge that this leaves a great deal to the imagination, but one suspects a code review would not catch the problem. The code was clean, the implementation on certain machines went awry.
Ideally, any software that runs on the system would be digitally signed by the development shop, after their code review process. Otherwise anyone with direct physical access to the hardware (or to the distribution system for code updates) could add malware like this guy did.
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prosecuting financial fraud is usually a great deal slower and more complex because it's more difficult to prove intent (compared to both incompetence and pursuit of legitimate profit), because it can involve so many more people (many of whom may not have been doing anything wrong at the individual level, but whose actions taken together were wrong at an institutional level), and because the rewards are more diffuse…
Signing someone else's name at the behest of a department head is pretty clear fraud (and more obvious when it's 1000's of documents being signed with someone else's name and backdated). Watch the 60 Minutes segments. Prosecutors don't want to take on the financial sector because it ruins their achievement record if they lose or it takes too long because the defendant can afford good lawyers. They stick to the people…
> No-one has been prosecuted for the financial crisis, I mean the economy was DESTROYED, we are years into it now.
Why should they be proscecuted? We re-elected Barnie Frank.
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet they still use the Windows "ding" for everything, because of course there's no budget for sound design in an ATM project. I hear those weirdly-out-of-place Windows sounds everywhere. It grates on me the same way Comic Sans grates on those who appreciate type. Someone who does sound design could pick up this banner and impress everyone with set of free UI sounds that are classic and usable.
Not only is it annoying but it broadcasts "You are using a Windows machine". Which to be also broadcasts "This machine is completely untrustworthy for financial purposes." Oh, and a lot of them are Diebolds...
Which to be also broadcasts "This machine is completely untrustworthy for financial purposes."
Does it? I've never heard of anyone defrauding a BofA ATM except this guy. And this guy got caught.
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet they still use the Windows "ding" for everything, because of course there's no budget for sound design in an ATM project. I hear those weirdly-out-of-place Windows sounds everywhere. It grates on me the same way Comic Sans grates on those who appreciate type. Someone who does sound design could pick up this banner and impress everyone with set of free UI sounds that are classic and usable.
Ha! The New Jersey Transit ticket kiosks at 8th street station in Philly make the same Windows ding noise. It sounds like a program is stuck on an error, and it's like a dog whistle to me. That said, about your comment "Someone who does sound design could pick up this banner and impress everyone with set of free UI sounds that are classic and usable." -- I'm betting that's exactly what MS was trying to do. They commi…
Good point. I suppose the ubiquity of the sounds themselves helps to make them disconcerting.
Then again, maybe using Windows isn't a terribly positive association for some to have either.
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fine, more apropos- yeah, the guy was an idiot. I was going to pontificate on how one might actually pull this off, but there's always a problem: you're gonna make mistakes and eventually get caught.
Or, you won't and then no one will know how you did it.
If you don't mess up, nobody will know that you did it anything at all.
They don't seem to publish statistics on these things very often, but my gut tells me more people get away with crimes than don't.
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#47I'm just dying to know how exactly he did it and how they tracked him down. I've joked about this type of thing with friends, but it would be absolutely hilarious if he did something to the effect of putting his information within the malware which led cops right to his doorsteps. I have a feeling, this may be something at the level of a burglar leaving footprints in the snow right to his home... I mean, wouldn't the…
ATM fraud has a long and storied history. Kind of a must read for security types since some amount of 'loss' through the ATM network is planned for by the banks. At a surety conference hosted by First Data and SWIFT there was a lively discussion where everyone agreed that the old "tie a chain around it and take it with you" was the most difficult one to guard against. But at least it met the critical criteria of detection.
The serial numbers of every bill that goes into an ATM are recorded, the date they leave the ATM is also recorded, the serial numbers of every bill that enters a bank are recorded and their source. Cash is anonymous but it's life cycle is not.
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#48On a related note: The Bank Of America ATMs are really, really great. Their ATMs and their online bill pay service are some great banking tech. They're the only reason I'm a BoA customer for my checking and cashflow accounts. With their BillPay service, I can have BoA download e-bills from, say, credit card companies or utilities, and pay the amount of the bill on its due date. I never have to worry about it. I can s…
Unless you're in Washington state like me. Then only about half of their total functionality works due to the antiquated system they still have in place.
I am one of these purgatory accounts in WA too. It's amazing to me, because their acquisition of Seafirst occured over 25 years ago. You'd think they could have sorted out the IT merger issues since then :P
Re: BofA Programmer Heads to Prison After Coding ATMs to Spit Out Free Cash
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any code that has monetary effects has to go through a series of code reviews The article reported that he installed malware on select ATMs. I acknowledge that this leaves a great deal to the imagination, but one suspects a code review would not catch the problem. The code was clean, the implementation on certain machines went awry.
In other words, he did some kind of internal hacking to install his code - illegally bypassing the code review process.
Maybe? I can only speculate that the hack wasn't in the code at all, but something he installed on the individual ATM.
"Oh, look: you can login to the ATM after installing the code. Hey what if I ..."
If so he didn't bypass the code review so much as skip around it, whistling a jaunty 'nope nothing illegal here' tune.