Banks scramble to replace Windows XP as microsoft drops support for it.But An estimated 95% of the world’s ATMs still run the 12-year-old operating system. Over 420,000 ATMs are now easy targets for hackers
On 8th April 2014, Microsoft officially dropped support for Windows XP. Despite being ancient in operating system years, XP is still used by anywhere about 95% world wide and about 98% of ATM's here in Uganda
Statistics
says it’s unclear what might happen to all those XP-fueled ATM's, but
it’s possible that hackers could take advantage of the system’s openings
to steal your card number and pin when you try to take out money.Big
banks like Back lays Bank and Crane Bank are more likely to upgrade their
systems to keep their customers safe. However it’s unlikely the ATM at
your local town especially in the village towns are going to drop the
kind of cash it coasts for the upgrade. Plus there's no upgrade that
will help any machine made over ten years ago: they’ll just have to be
replaced.ATMs aren’t the only piece of everyday life that uses XP either. Nearly 10 percent of the computers in the US government run the operating system, and nearly 85 percent of the computers in the National Health Service in the U.K. rely on it. Almost half the people in China using a desktop or tablet computer are running XP. Without support for the operating system, any computer running it could become an easy target.
As a user, there's really not much to do to protect yourself from any of these problems, either. While you can upgrade your computer, you can’t control what your local ATM is up to. It might be worth checking to see if they’ve made any changes to keep malware from stealing your information when you try to take out a few bucks. And for the OpenSSL bug, GigaOm writes about the very limited options for what web users can do to make sure their information is safe:
All in all. I hop all our ATMs will soon have the upgrade they need for us all to have that sence of safty.
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