The Reserve Bank of India has given the nation's banks a one-year deadline to migrate ATMs away from the Microsoft XP operating system, more than five years after support for the O/S was switched off by the Redmond-based tech giant.
The RBI has given the banking sector a series of staged deadlines to migrate away from XP amid concerns that the continued operation of machines using the software leaves the sector open to attack from hackers.
"The slow progress on the part of the banks in addressing these issues has been viewed seriously by the RBI," says the Bank in a circular. "As you may appreciate, the vulnerability arising from the banks’ ATMs operating on unsupported version of operating system and non-implementation of other security measures, could potentially affect the interests of the banks’ customers adversely, apart from such occurrences, if any, impinging on the image of the bank."
In the interim, the Bank has given operators of XP-based machines a one-month deadline to urgently implement a a range of security measures on legacy machines, including BIOS passwords and the diabling of USB ports and auto-run facilities, and a six month timeline to install anti-skimming devices.