Category Archives: atm shimmer

How Cyber Sleuths Cracked an ATM Shimmer Gang

Posted on by

In 2015, police departments worldwide started finding ATMs compromised with advanced new “shimming” devices made to clone data from chip card transactions. Authorities in the United States and abroad had seized many of these shimmers, but for years couldn’t decrypt the data on the devices. This is a story of ingenuity and happenstance, and how one former Secret Service agent helped crack a code that revealed the contours of a global organized crime ring. Continue reading How Cyber Sleuths Cracked an ATM Shimmer Gang→

ATM ‘Shimmers’ Target Chip-Based Cards

Posted on by

Several readers have called attention to warnings coming out of Canada about a supposed new form of ATM skimming called “shimming.” Shimming attacks are not new (KrebsOnSecurity first wrote about them in August 2015), but they are likely to become more common as a greater number of banks in the United States shift to issuing chip-based cards. Here’s a brief primer on shimming attacks, and why they succeed. Continue reading ATM ‘Shimmers’ Target Chip-Based Cards→