Terminal Fraud Seminar Update

The EAST FCS Terminal Fraud Seminar was held on 10th October 2018 in London, co-located with RBRs ATM & Cyber Security 2018 Conference. The interactive and successful event focused on two key outputs of the EAST Expert Group on All Terminal Fraud (EGAF):

• Guidelines regarding logical attacks on ATMs
• Standardised fraud definitions

An introduction to EGAF by the Chair, Otto de Jong, was followed by a presentation by EAST’s Executive Director Lachlan Gunn, covering the latest EAST fraud statistics from the H1 2018 European Payment Terminal Crime Report. This highlighted that losses due to card fraud at payment terminals have fallen to the lowest level since 2005. Total losses of €107 million were reported and the decrease is primarily due to a fall in losses due to card skimming (down from €118 million to €104 million). Overall payment terminal related fraud incidents were down 43% (from 11,934 to 6,790). Within this total card skimming incidents were down 19% (from 1,221 to 985) and well below the peak of 5,743 incidents reported during the same period in 2010.

Juan Jesus Leon Cobos of GMV then covered the evolution of ‘Cash-out’/jackpotting attacks, sharing the latest trends from Latin America.  This was followed by a presentation from Tobias-Christian Wieloch of the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) at Europol which focused on Europol’s published ‘Guidance & Recommendations regarding Logical & Malware Attacks on ATMs’, and an update to it that will soon be available.

Nick Webber, an independent forensic expert, then shared insights into card shimming and ‘wedge’ attacks, with a particular focus on the UK experience.

The final presentation came from Ben Birtwistle of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Claire Shufflebotham of TMD Security, who jointly covered the existing fraud definitions published by EAST, and steps being taken to update and simplify the definitions using graphics, as well as the addition of criminal benefits for each fraud type.  Otto de Jong then summarised the event and what would be taken forward for future discusson.

Attendance to the regular EAST EGAF work group meetings is limited and this event enabled active participation and input from a much wider pool of expertise.  Due to the positive response received from delegates, this Terminal Fraud Seminar is expected to be repeated in 2019.