London, UK – 14 December 2015 – WinMagic Inc., the leading provider of encryption and intelligent key management solutions, today announced a strategic partnership with NCR, the global leader in consumer transaction technology, to prevent offline malware attacks on ATMs around the world. The new partnership means NCR will offer NCR Secure Hard Disk Encryption, powered by WinMagic SecureDoc, as an optional security upgrade for many NCR and multi-vendor ATMs. It will also be offered as a security option for all new NCR ATMs.
Given ATMs do not have trusted users or administrators for local authentication, protecting the Operating System (OS) from offline threats is a prime motivation for encryption. With WinMagic PBConnex pre-boot network authentication, NCR Secure Hard Disk Encryption ensures the machine is authenticated before the ATM OS decrypts and loads, making it impossible to insert malware or access local data.
John Morrow, VP and General Manager of NCR Management and Security Solutions, said: "NCR Secure Hard Disk Encryption will help ensure that malware cannot be added to an ATM’s hard disk when it is offline. This will help to prevent the offline malware attacks such as Ploutus, Tyupkin and PADPIN cashing out an ATM. Moreover, NCR Secure Hard Disk Encryption will protect against ATM cores or Hard Disks being stolen and used to reverse engineer ATM software or harvest data on the Hard Disk. This solution will form a vital component of our security offering, allowing our customers to benefit from WinMagic’s expertise in encryption management and safeguarding data.”
In addition to protecting physical ATMs, NCR Secure Hard Disk Encryption includes centralised monitoring capabilities and real-time network status updates on individual machines to provide an early warning system for potential attacks.
Darin Welfare, EMEA VP for WinMagic, said: “Like many Internet of Things devices, ATMs must boot without a trusted user present. Using a locally stored or derived encryption key to authenticate the machine would not be PCI compliant and expose the machine to offline threats. Using our encryption and pre-boot authentication expertise, the NCR solution protects ATMs from offline threats while reducing the administration burden.”
The NCR partnership with WinMagic is the result of a two-year relationship and has involved rigorous testing of WinMagic’s solution on all NCR ATM models. NCR Secure Hard Disk Encryption solution is available immediately.
