NoW hacker Glenn Mulcaire used ATM for phone hacking

Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator at the centre of the News of the World scandal, hacked a cash machine and used its phone line to gain access to victims' voicemails.

With Mulcaire having pleaded guilty to phone hacking-related charges and now currently in court for his sentencing hearing, more details about his illegal work for Rupert Murdoch's tabloid are emerging.

According to the Guardian, in 2006 police discovered that Mulcaire hacked an ATM in a shop in Sutton to use its phone line.

Because the line was only supposed to be used to relay transaction information from the ATM to a database, suspicions were raised when BT began sending bills to Cash Point Machines, which forwarded them to the shop owner.

The itemised bills showed that Mulcaire was using the line to hack phones belonging to celebrities and members of the royal household. At one point the PI even called BT to complain about a fault on the ATM line.

Channels

Retail banking Security

Keywords

Automated teller machines and network services

Comments: (3)

A Finextra member 01 July, 2014, 11:08

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I think that "hack" may be a bit of a stretch. What I'm guessing he did was plug a 4.99 handsset from argos into the adsl filter on the installed line behind the ATM, or if there was a spare power socket he might have gone a little more sophisticated and run a cordless handset base and phoned from, say, a cafe next door. Not exactly rocket science. Pure theft, but pretty simple.

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A Finextra member 01 July, 2014, 15:27

0 likes To be honest this whole case was based on stupidity - don't leave your voicemail password set to the default! For the same reason you don't leave your front door unlocked for people to read your mail...

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Hitesh Thakkar - SME - Fintech startups (APAC and Africa) - India 02 July, 2014, 13:52

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Cyber Security, IT security has reached to advance level where as dial up line based ATM system which were prevailing from a decade needs to be strongly assessed and controls to avoid such back door entry at perimeter of network are needed.

We are now in era of Security event and log management which has reached to level that, early warning can be raised for such events in CISO dashboards.

I think old dial up ATMs have been target for last few incidents of security breaches.