Vacationing Security Consultant Finds Stealthy ATM Card Skimmer

Sometimes being paranoid can save your butt, or, at least in this case, your checking account.

Cybersecurity consultant Benjamin Tedesco was on vacation in Vienna, Austria, about to withdraw some cash, when he noticed something there was something off about the ATM machine he was going to use: there was a little bit of suspicious glue around the credit card reader, which otherwise looked perfectly normal.

"Being security paranoid, I repeated my typical habit of checking the card reader with my hand as I have 100's of times," Tedesco, who works for security company Carbon Black, wrote in a blog post. "Today's the day when my security awareness paid off!"

That's how he found a credit card skimmer, a perfect replica of the actual card reader glued on top of it, designed to steal his credit card information.

"And just because I'm paranoid," he says in a video, showing how the skimmer comes off with a bit of a tug.

Credit card skimmers, despite years of banks and credit card companies fighting against them, are still a problem. And criminals are always trying to outsmart the latest protections or countermeasures, getting better, and faster, at turning regular-looking ATMs, or even payment terminals, into automated credit card-stealing machines.

So, as Tedesco puts it in the video, "always check for ATM skimmers." In other words, always be vigilant. And a bit paranoid.