The Reserve Bank of India has told banks upgrade their ATMs within a stipulated timeframe. The central bank feels the banks are not showing enough urgency in this matter and has been lagging. The bank will now have to implement several security measures by August 2018 upgrade all ATMs with supported version of operating in a phased manner by June 2019. The RBI had in April pointed out to the banks through a circular the various shortcomings in meeting the security aspects of ATMs, especially their running the ATMs on lapsed operating systems such as Windows XP. There are more than 2 lakh ATMs in the country as of February 2018. The circular issued recently says the RBI is viewing with seriousness the slow progress on the part of the banks in addressing these issues. It said the vulnerability arising from the 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 banks and white label ATM operators have been asked to implement security measures such as BIOS password, disabling USB ports, disabling auto-run facility, applying the latest patches of operating system and other software, terminal security solution, time-based admin access by August. They are also required to implement anti-skimming and whitelisting solution by March 2019.
