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I’m working as an ATM incident manager that covers Germany and I don’t get many calls per day, due to the nature of my job. However, I do ocasionally need to speak to techicians and banks that we work with, in order to coordinate everything. Usually, phone calls with people working at a bank is pretty straightforward, but technicians are mostly goofballs. Some are nice, some aren’t and some are just mental.
This happened to me yesterday. I’ve received a call from a bank that one of their ATMs froze and stays frozen even after a reboot, so they asked me to check the status of it on our end. The ATM showed to be operational, however, I saw that the memory was around 92-93% used. This is highly unusual, since the ATM’s memory should be only between 15-25% used. I asked them to pull the logs for me, so I can check what seems to be the issue.
Later, I recieve the logs and I can’t recognize most of the files there. I soon noticed the “.exe” file for launching Assassin’s Creed. That’s when I noticed that the logs are mostly game files, that have been thrown into the ATM. After a moment of disbelief and after showing the case to my colleagues, I proceeded to give a call to the technician who last did a manual installation on the ATM and I was hoping that he remembers the unit, since he was last there a few months ago.
I give a call to the technician and asked him to explain the situation. Thankfully, he remembered and he said that, during the manual installation of a software that enables certain remote updates on an ATM, he accidentaly moved all files from his thumb drive into the machine and not just the installation files. He just left everything there and thought that no issues would occur. However, the ATM’s memory was almost full and it couldn’t receive updates, which caused the unit to freeze after a few months.
Then, he asked me if I’m going to contact the authorities. After a moment of sheer confusion, I told him to just go back and remove the game files from the ATM. After I hung up, I shared my disbelief with my collegaues. Why would I call the police because he “installed” a video game on the ATM? Then we realized that the technician was caught red-handed having a pirated game, which is not a joke in Germany.
The technician will probably get reported by his manager and he is yet to delete the files from the ATM. I still can’t take a grasp on the entire bizzarity that happened yesterday and I’m yet to recieve more updates on this.
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