[Ramius]

How many people, given full access to an ATM or POS terminal, could debit the accounts of other bank customers?

An ATM or POS term doesn't give you access to the machine. Can't reboot it from there to another system, yadda yadda yadda. But can you say the same thing for somebody that has access to the *inside* of the ATM??

*That's* access.

[Southack]

If you are inside **either** an ATM or a Windows PC, you can take the hard drive or the cash or whatever, but that physical strategy is useless against the ATM's security sytem for the bank's customers, as no matter what you do to the ATM (well, barring running the machine and copying new cards from the typed in PINs), you can't touch the actual accounts of other bank customers, and certainly can't do it en masse to the entire bank.

So putting networked PC's in vulnerable locations, combined with storing critical data on a secure LAN, would seem to have some level of security value. That's what works for ATM's and POS terminals, after all.

And we're all wired. This is the 21st Century. We all have access to the biggest LAN around.

Pity that not all of our security takes that fact into account...