NEW DELHI: The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Thursday pulled up banks for the slow progress in upgrading ATMs and enhancing their security, warning them that if required measures are not taken in time, they will have to face action.
The RBI circular also notified firm timelines by which time the measures have to be completed.
“The slow progress on the part of the banks in addressing these issues has been viewed seriously by the RBI. As you may appreciate, the vulnerability arising from the banks’ ATMs operating on unsupported version of operating system and non-implementation of other security measures, could potentially affect the interests of the banks’ customers adversely, apart from such occurrences, if any, impinging on the image of the bank,” the RBI said.
“In order to address these issues in a time-bound manner, banks and White-Label ATM Operators are advised to initiate immediate action in this regard and implement the following control measures as per the prescribed timelines,” it added.
As per this timeline, banks have to implement security measures like BIOS passwords, disable USB ports and auto-run facilities, apply operating system patches, etc., by August. They also have to upgrade all ATMs with supported versions of operating systems in a phased manner by June next year.
Antiskimming and whitelisting solution will also have to be implemented by March 2019. As of February, 2018, there were over 2.06 lakh ATMs across the country.
Thursday’s circular comes in the wake of an earlier “confidential circular” to banks sent in April, 2017, which had highlighted concerns about the ATMs running on unsupported operating systems.