In 2011, an Australian bartender named Don Saunders figured out how to get free money from ATMs. He stumbled into the hack late one night. (It makes a better story if we imagine he was drunk at the time.) He noticed a way that he could transfer money he didn’t have from one account to another, then withdraw the cash without the system recording the transaction. The bonanza resulted from a vulnerability in the ATM’s software used to record transfers between accounts, combined with another vulnerability in the time lag in how the various accounts credited and debited when the ATMs went offline
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