Inside job

Cash machines are vulnerable to hackers, say computer scientists. Michael
Bond and Richard Clayton at Cambridge University have devised a way to crack the
computers banks use to check the validity of cash card PIN numbers
(www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/ descrack).
Only a crooked banking insider with access
to one of the three encryption keys used in the bank’s software would be able to
pull off the attack. But a recent survey carried out by British consultancy firm
Ernst and Young revealed that employees were responsible for 82 per cent of
known business fraud in 2000.