BHUBANESWAR: The Commissionerate of Police have arrested a key member of a gang which was involved in at least six ATM thefts by hacking into the software of the machines. The accused Ajay Chaudhury, is a native of Rudrapur in Uttarakhand and was involved in two similar cases of Hi-Tech ATM thefts in Bengaluru and Lucknow in 2014 and 2016 respectively.
In the spate of thefts in Odisha, in which over Rs 40 lakh was looted from ATMs in four districts, Chaudhury and one of his accomplices were stationed at the site of the crime, while two others operated from a remote location. Three members of the gang are still absconding.
The Twin City police have seized six bank accounts with deposits of Rs 8 lakh, a bank locker, a high-end laptop, a hard drive and three mobile phones from Ajay Chaudhury.
The ATMs were targeted at midnight when the security guard was napping. Two members entered the counter and pulled down the shutters. While one kept a watch, the other used a master key to open the kiosk’s panel.
A malware was uploaded to the machine, which allowed the system to go into the command of the remote user who was an accomplice and helped override the currency withdrawal limit of the ATM. The person who was physically present at
the counter could then operate the ATM kiosk and dispense high denomination currency notes present in the cash repository.
“They used a Chinese malware which had an ability to switch into self destruction mode within 15 minutes after the entire operation was executed,” Police Commissioner Yogesh Bahadur Khurania said. They also took utmost care not to use mobile phones. An application, ‘YCap’ was used by the members to communicate among themselves, Khurania added.
There are 6,125 ATMs in Odisha, of which 1,200 machines use Windows XP whose security is not robust enough to withstand hacking. The gang took advantage of the vulnerabiltiy of the Windows XP operating system, Police DG KB Singh said.
The State police have circulated an advisory to all private and Nationalised banks to upgrade the operating system of ATM softwares to Windows 10, Singh added.