BANGKOK, Aug. 28 (Xinhua) -- Thai Government Savings Bank (GSB) Sunday disclosed its teller machines will be equipped with an anti-malware program and back to normal operation in September after the bank suffered an ATM hack.
GSB chief executive officer Chatchai Payuhanaveechai said the Scottish company NCR, the bank's ATM vendor, has upgraded a program to protect ATMs from malware virus, which is also the first in Asia-Pacific, will be installed at the existing ATMs manufactured by NCR.
He added that 60 teams of computer programmers are to be despatched to install the program at a rate of 200 ATMs a day.
The state-owned GSB shut down approximately 3,000 of their ATMs following an ongoing police investigation into the recent hack in which hackers, identified as an eastern European gang, were able to infect many its cash machines with malware.
GSB found that millions of Thailand Baht were stolen between Aug. 1 and 8 from 21 ATMs across the six provinces including Bangkok and Phuket. The hackers made over 12.29 Million Thailand Baht (US$346,000) by inserting cards installed with malware into multiple ATMs to spew out cash, up to 40,000 Baht each transaction.
The bank plans to install an addition of 1,000 new ATMs of different brands namely Omron and Wincor to serve the needs of customers in places where the services are not available.
