Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

Part of our work involves supporting red team engagements. We review completed tests, size up the risk tied to each vulnerability and build out recommendations for shoring up the infrastructure. This time around, we wanted to pull back the curtain on something special. It’s ATM security. 

This article is written to help with security assessments on ATMs, showing possible vulnerabilities you may find. It covers many things, from running malware bought off a forum, to an insider on the bank’s payroll, to a service technician who understands the machine’s internals and has been handed broad access to the equipment. We also look at whether a hacker could get into the bank’s broader network simply because the perimeter wasn’t locked down well enough.

Nothing here is meant as a tutorial. We’re documenting weaknesses hackers could exploit so that defenders know what to fix, not handing anyone a blueprint. We take no responsibility for how this information is used.

With that out of the way, let’s start with where ATMs came from.

The History of ATMs

London got the world’s first working ATM on June 27, 1967. It was primitive by today’s standards, incapable of checking a balance, which is exactly why withdrawals topped out at 10 pounds, and it dispensed cash only against special vouchers rather than reading a card. 

Nearly six decades later, ATMs look nothing like those early cash dispensers. Now they are multifunctional devices, but the hackers never stopped circling. Part of the appeal is obvious. An ATM sits on a pile of cash and offers quick access to it, and there are simply too many machines scattered across too many places to guard them all closely. A lot of them sit in isolated, low traffic spots that run unattended around the clock, think gas stations. That has shaped decades of security investment, most of it aimed at physical hardening. Today’s units can weigh over half a ton and come loaded with sensors tracking position, internal temperature, and whether a compartment has been pried open.

Here’s the catch, though. The safe holding the cash is genuinely hard to crack, but the compartment housing the control electronics is a different story, and in our assessment, it remains poorly defended. That gap opens the door to logical attacks, ones that skip the crowbar entirely and go after the software instead, and that category has been gaining ground fast.

Cisco Talos has tracked a steady climb in new ATM malware variants since 2009. The raw sample count still looks small next to other malware families, but don’t let that fool you. Europe alone saw logical attacks on ATMs jump 269% in 2020 versus the year prior, and the average payout per incident ballooned nearly a thousandfold across that same window, climbing from roughly a thousand euros to well over a million.

What changed the game was availability. ATM malware used to be a rare, closely guarded tool. Once it started circulating more freely on underground markets, prices fell and so did the skill required to use it. Cutlet Maker, which surfaced in 2017, is a good illustration. It came bundled with a Russian language manual complete with troubleshooting notes for running it against different ATM models.

Fast forward to 2024, and vendors on those same markets were offering ATM malware through subscription pricing, monthly plans included.

Logical attacks have always had one real weakness. They take skill and patience to pull off. That’s why cheap, well documented malware kits have had such an outsized impact on the trend. Their upside for hackers is just as real. They’re far quieter than smashing a machine open, and they often let the same person come back to a compromised ATM again and again. Manufacturers have started fighting back on the hardware side too, with tamper protected cassettes that flood the cash inside with indelible ink the moment someone tries to force them open, ruining the bills instantly.

Brief Attack Statistics

The numbers tell their own story. ATM related crime climbed 600% between 2019 and 2022, with 165% of that increase packed into 2021 and 2022 alone. Physical break ins, which have always driven the bulk of ATM crime, contributed alongside the rise in logical attacks. Germany had 496 ATM explosions recorded in 2022, a record for the country. Zoom out globally, and incidents of that kind blew past 18,000 in 2023.

Losses have kept pace. Banks worldwide absorbed $2.4 billion in direct losses from ATM fraud by the close of 2023. Europe’s share came to 173 million euros, with 67 million of that tied specifically to skimming. The United States handles just 25.29% of global transaction volume yet accounts for 42.32% of global losses. Skimming remains a big part of why, showing up in 45% of all ATM fraud cases in 2023 and costing North America over $900 million, with more than 315,000 cards compromised across at least 3,000 financial institutions.

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The market for ATM protection has grown right alongside the threat. Still, priorities inside most banks remain lopsided. Physical security tends to get the lion’s share of attention, while the operating system, drivers, and control software logic running underneath often get treated as an afterthought. That imbalance carries real consequences. A 2022 RTM Group study found that hackers could breach an ATM’s housing without setting off an alarm in one out of every two attempts, giving them free rein to tamper with the equipment inside.

How an ATM Is Built

Making sense of how these attacks work starts with understanding what happens inside the machine during an ordinary transaction. We’ll walk through that process using one representative configuration, illustrated in the diagram below.

The diagram reflects one specific setup we’re using for illustration, not a universal default, since real world configurations vary by device.

1. User Layer

From where the customer stands, using an ATM is simple. They need to present a card and pick a transaction. That wasn’t always the whole story. Inserting a physical card into a reader used to be the only entry point, and that reliance on the magnetic stripe made skimming and shimming, techniques aimed at stealing card data to produce counterfeit copies, a persistent problem for years.

Contactless cards changed the entry point itself. NFC readers now sit alongside traditional card slots on most machines. 

A PIN code layers on additional protection against someone using a stolen card. Entry happens through an encrypting PIN pad, a combination of physical keypad and cryptographic module that ensures the PIN never travels or gets stored anywhere in plain text. Verification of the resulting encrypted PIN block happens back at the processing center. 

Once identity checks clear, you can withdraw cash, check your balance, transfer funds, and so forth. There’s a full computer running inside the housing, but customers never get anywhere near it directly. Every interaction they have flows through a single banking application running in kiosk mode, locked to full screen.

2. OS Layer

That computer we just mentioned lives inside what’s called the service zone, and this section covers what happens there, setting the cash handling hardware aside for the moment. Physically, the service zone is protected by a thin door and a basic lock. Machines from the same product line frequently share an identical key too, one that’s often available for purchase online with minimal effort.

Beyond the system unit itself, the service zone also houses the ATM’s networking equipment and its wired connections to the card reader, contactless reader, PIN pad, and dispenser, typically running over USB, Ethernet, PCI, or COM interfaces depending on the device.

Windows powers most of these systems, historically through Windows Embedded and increasingly through Windows IoT, a Windows 10 variant built for embedded use.

The kiosk application isn’t the only thing running on that OS. Alongside it sits the ATM’s control software plus a handful of security tools. That can be antivirus protection, Windows AppLocker that keeps unauthorized programs from executing, and a VPN client that maintains a secure tunnel back to the bank’s internal network.

Control software is arguably the most important piece at this layer. Core responsibilities for the control software boil down to managing peripherals and communicating with the processing center, though specific implementations often add more on top of that. Some bundle in software for a monitoring server, letting technicians manage an entire network of self service machines remotely. Others are built in a supervisor mode meant purely for technical staff, offering quick access to diagnostic tools through a hidden menu to simplify physical maintenance visits.

3. Network Layer

Selecting a transaction sets off a verification process handled entirely by the processing center, a server living on the bank’s internal network. That server confirms the card data is legitimate, checks the PIN again before letting the transaction through, rules out any restrictions on the account, and verifies there’s enough balance to cover the request.

Everything exchanged between the ATM and the processing center travels encrypted, usually through a VPN tunnel, protecting against interception or tampering along the way. NDC and DDC are the most common messaging protocols in this exchange, functioning as something of an informal industry standard even before multi-vendor control software became widespread. ISO 8583 and its various offshoots see heavy use as well. 

The processing center isn’t the only thing an ATM talks to. Many machines also maintain a connection to a monitoring server used for remote management, health checks, and pushing updates, and unlike the processing center link, this channel frequently runs without any encryption at all.

4. Firmware Layer

Once the processing center signs off, the control software hands things over to the dispenser for a withdrawal, or the deposit module if cash is going in. These components typically sit inside the most fortified section of the ATM, the safe zone, built from tougher materials and secured with its own dedicated key separate from the service zone. 

The dispenser counts out the required banknotes from the ATM’s cassettes, moves them into position at the dispensing tray, then opens the shutter, the physical flap that blocks access to the cash until it’s ready. Data moving between the control software and the dispenser can be encrypted, and both sides authenticate one another before any exchange begins, a safeguard against device spoofing. All of that encryption and authentication logic lives directly in the dispenser’s own firmware. 

Deposits work differently. Incoming banknotes pass through a validator that checks their authenticity.

ATM Attacks

With the mechanics of an ATM covered, we can turn to the threats themselves. Every attack against these machines falls into one of two broad camps, physical or logical, depending on what the hacker is going after and how they approach it.

Physical attacks go straight after the machine or its components, aiming to extract cash or knock the device out of normal operation without touching a line of code. These predate targeted malware by decades and don’t require much specialized skill. Some don’t even target the machine itself, focusing instead on the people standing in front of it.

Logical attacks operate on a different level entirely. They demand genuine technical skill and preparation, built around exploiting weaknesses in the ATM’s software and network layers. They draw less public attention than physical attacks despite posing a bigger threat to banks, largely because they’re quieter and let a hacker return to the same compromised machine to cash in more than once.

System attacks go after functionality or logic running at the ATM’s OS layer, typically aiming to extract cash or sidestep security controls outright. Black box attacks deserve special attention, where a hacker skips gaining OS access altogether and instead wires their own device directly into the dispenser to control it externally. The same technique can target other peripherals, like the banknote validator.

Network attacks aim at the ATM’s networking components instead, with hackers looking to intercept, forge, or otherwise abuse data in transit, or to seize remote control of the machine. With weak enough safeguards in place, a hacker can forge the responses coming back to the ATM and push through a cash withdrawal even after the processing center rejected it.

Not every attack in this framework ends with cash in hand. A hacker might, say, work to gain remote network access first, then pivot into an OS layer attack from there. 

We have seen cases where compromising a single ATM meant compromising the entire bank because there was no network segmentation in place. Conversely, gaining access to the bank’s internal network could provide a path to ATMs and other critical systems connected to it. Credential reuse and a lack of understanding of Active Directory security can lead to devastating consequences in environments like these.

Summary

ATMs have evolved from simple cash dispensers into complex and networked systems. Their security has evolved unevenly alongside them. Physical hardening has made the cash safe itself genuinely difficult to crack, but the service zone housing the control electronics remains comparatively exposed, and that gap has fueled a steady rise in logical attacks. These attacks demand more skill than a physical break-in, but they’re increasingly accessible because of well-documented malware kits.

Cybersecurity is a vast field, and we offer courses covering a wide range of topics, including Active Directory Hacking, Wi-Fi Hacking, Web Application Hacking, SCADA Security, and much more. Our course library is constantly growing as we continue to add new training, all of which is available through our Member Gold plan. If you want unlimited access to our entire training library, including our most advanced courses, consider upgrading to Subscriber Pro.

The post Pentesting: A Look at ATM Security first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Welcome back, aspiring cyberwarriors!

Lately, we’ve covered several tools you can use with your laptop to track nearby devices and people. While they’re useful, their effectiveness depends on the strength of your Bluetooth adapter, and, of course, you need to have your laptop with you.

This time, we’re doing things differently. We want to show you a device that can automatically monitor nearby devices for extended periods, anywhere you choose to place it, and as often as you want. It doesn’t rely solely on Bluetooth, as it also uses Wi-Fi, which is far more likely to be enabled, increasing the chances of detecting someone in your area.

What is Paxcounter

Paxcounter is an open-source firmware project that takes a cheap little ESP32 development board and turns it into a sensor that can count people. Almost every smartphone in the world is constantly sending out small Wi-Fi signals, called probe requests, and Bluetooth signals too, even when the phone is not connected to anything. Paxcounter listens for these signals in the air. It counts how many different devices it hears during each scan, and from that, it can tell you a real time estimate of how many people are nearby.

The project started out as a simple way to measure how many passengers or pedestrians pass through a certain spot. But over time, it grew into something much bigger. Now it works as a general purpose IoT platform, built on hardware that usually costs somewhere between $10 and $30. Besides its main job of counting Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices, a Paxcounter can also read environmental sensors, track its GPS position, keep accurate time, and send all of that data out through LoRaWAN, MQTT, a local serial connection, or straight onto an SD card. 

How the Counting Works

The way Paxcounter counts people is simple, but it was clearly built with privacy in mind from the very start. Every scan cycle, which lasts 60 seconds by default, the device switches its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios into scanning mode and listens for probe requests and advertisement packets coming from nearby devices. Each of these packets carries a MAC address. Paxcounter takes just the last two bytes of that address and turns them into a short, temporary ID. This ID is only used to check for duplicates during that one scan cycle. Once the cycle ends, the count of unique IDs gets sent out, and the whole list is wiped from memory. The firmware also does not try to fingerprint any device. It never tries to figure out a phone’s brand, its operating system, or who owns it. All it wants to know is whether that device has already been counted in the current window.

This scan and clear cycle just keeps repeating, either nonstop or on a schedule if deep sleep power saving is turned on. The results, which include the Wi-Fi count, the Bluetooth count, and sometimes live sensor readings too, get packed into a small payload and sent out through whatever channel the device is set up to use. One thing worth knowing is that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning actually share the same 2.4 GHz radio hardware on the ESP32. So running both scans at the same time slightly lowers the accuracy of each one. Because of that, the project’s own advice is to split Wi-Fi only counting and Bluetooth only counting across two separate devices whenever the best possible accuracy is needed for both.

One Firmware, Many Boards

Paxcounter comes with a hardware abstraction layer and its own pin mapping files for dozens of ESP32 and ESP32-S3 boards. These come from well known manufacturers like LILYGO and TTGO, Heltec, Pycom, WeMos, M5Stack, and Adafruit, and there is also a generic template ready for boards that are not officially supported yet. LILYGO even sells a ready-made board called Paxcounter LoRa, built specifically to run this firmware. 

Depending on which board you pick, your device can end up supporting a LoRaWAN radio for sending data over long distances while using very little power, an OLED status screen, or a single color, RGB, or larger LED matrix light to show status. It can also support a physical button for flipping through display pages or sending an alarm message, battery voltage monitoring, GPS positioning, a real time clock chip along with IF482 or DCF77 time telegram output, and even an SD card slot for logging data locally when there is no network around.

Because the whole system was designed to be truly portable, the documentation goes into real detail about power draw, which usually sits somewhere between 450 and 1000 milliwatts depending on how the device is set up. It also makes good use of the ESP32’s deep sleep mode, so a device can keep running for a long stretch of time on just one 18650 lithium ion battery cell. Members of the community have already shared several 3D printable enclosure designs on Thingiverse for the more popular boards.

Getting the Device Up and Running

Paxcounter is built using PlatformIO instead of the plain Arduino IDE. This choice lets it work smoothly with editors like Visual Studio Code, Atom, or Eclipse, and it gives the project reproducible, script driven builds. In fact, the repository runs an automated PlatformIO build check every single time the code changes, using GitHub Actions, and there is even a CodeFactor badge that keeps an eye on ongoing code quality.

The configuration is intentionally spread across a handful of different files instead of being crammed into just one. This keeps board specific settings, behavioral settings, and personal settings nicely separated from each other. The platformio.ini file is where you select which board’s hardware profile you want to compile against. The paxcounter.conf file handles behavioral settings, things like how long a scan cycle lasts, sleep timing, and payload options. The shared lmic_config.h file sets the LoRaWAN region and frequency plan, so it matches the rules where you live. The shared loraconf.h file holds the device’s LoRaWAN join credentials, and the project recommends using OTAA rather than ABP for this. And the shared ota.conf file stores the Wi-Fi credentials the device uses for over the air firmware updates.

You can upload firmware the traditional way, over USB, or once a device has joined a LoRaWAN network, you can push updates over the air instead. A remote command tells the board to connect to Wi-Fi, check a hosted repository called PAX.express for a newer build, and then download and flash it automatically. If anything goes wrong during that process, it will roll back to the previous version on its own. Devices can also be set up to open a small local web based bootstrap menu right when they power on, which lets you upload a firmware file manually, even from a phone in tethering mode, without needing PlatformIO installed on site.

Configuration and Extensibility

Beyond just picking a board, Paxcounter gives you a long list of settings you can tune to fit your needs. It can log environmental data from sensors like the Bosch BMP180, BME280, BMP280, or BME680, read a Nova SDS011 particulate matter sensor to track dust in the air, and keep accurate time using either a DS3231 real time clock or a connected GPS module. 

Display and LED

On boards that come with an OLED display, Paxcounter shows live status information you can cycle through with a short press of the button. This includes the current pax count, meaning the people count, a histogram of recent activity, GPS status, environmental sensor readings, and the time of day. 

A long press of that same button sends an alarm message out over the network instead, which is a simple way to flag a problem from out in the field without needing any other kind of interface. Even on boards that do not have a display at all, a status LED still tells you what the device is doing through its blink pattern. You get a brief flash whenever a new Wi-Fi or Bluetooth device is spotted, a quick blink while the device is joining the LoRaWAN network, a short blink during data transmission, and a slow, long blink if there is a LoRaWAN stack error. Boards that have an RGB LED get a color coded version of these same signals.

How You Receive the Data

Once a Paxcounter has counted the people nearby and packed everything into a message, that data has to go somewhere so you can actually see it. How that happens depends on which output the device is using, and the good news is you can turn on more than one at the same time. If you are using LoRaWAN, which is the most common setup, the device does not send the data straight to you. Instead, a nearby LoRaWAN gateway picks up the signal first and forwards it on to a network server, usually The Things Stack. There is a small decoder script included with the project, and its job is to take that raw message and turn it into numbers you can actually read, something like a pax count of 14. From there, The Things Stack can pass the data along to your own app or dashboard using MQTT or a webhook, or you can simply watch it come in live through the built in console.

If a board does not have LoRa hardware built in, it can just skip the gateway completely and send that same kind of data straight to an MQTT service over Wi-Fi instead. You can also connect the device to a computer using a USB cable and read the numbers directly from a serial connection. This is a simple way to test things out without needing to set up a network at all. If SD card logging is turned on, everything also gets saved locally as a CSV file, so you can pull the card out later and open it up in a spreadsheet. This comes in handy in places where there is no network coverage to rely on. 

Where It’s Used

Because a single Paxcounter device is cheap to build and can be left running unattended for a long time, you will find it popping up in a pretty wide range of places. Retailers and shopping centers use it to measure foot traffic without needing to install cameras. Event organizers use it to watch how crowds move around a venue in real time. Pentesters can get a passive read on how many Wi-Fi and Bluetooth devices are active in a building, or to notice unexpected devices showing up where they shouldn’t, all without needing camera access or network credentials.

Legal and Privacy Considerations

Since Paxcounter’s whole job involves listening to wireless traffic, its documentation is unusually upfront about the legal side of things. It points out that sniffing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth MAC addresses may be regulated or restricted depending on where you live, and it links to specific starting references for the US, the UK, the Netherlands and the EU, and Germany. It also makes clear that the legal responsibility for how a device is built and deployed falls on the person doing it, especially for public deployments where the results might get published somewhere. On the technical side of privacy, the project’s own design actually holds up pretty well against that legal backdrop. Identifiers are only ever built from the last two bytes of a scanned MAC address, they are kept in memory just for the length of one scan cycle, and then they are discarded completely. No MAC addresses or identifiers are ever sent out over the network, and the firmware does not do any extra tracking or fingerprinting of the devices it scans.

Summary

What really makes Paxcounter stand out is not any single feature on its own. It is the whole combination working together. One piece of open source firmware supports dozens of cheap boards, runs for a long time on a small battery, counts people without saving anything identifying about them, doubles as a general environmental sensor node, speaks LoRaWAN, MQTT, serial, and SD card all at once, and can be fully reconfigured from a distance once it is out in the field. The full source code, the complete board list, and all the documentation are available on GitHub.

If you enjoy experimenting with frequencies and trying new things, we recommend signing up for our SDR for Hackers training. With Master OTW, you’ll learn how to use your computer and inexpensive SDR hardware to explore and hack a wide range of radio signals.

The post SDR (Signals Intelligence) for Hackers: Tracking People with ESP32-Paxcounter first appeared on Hackers Arise.

Lockheed Martin unveiled a new, cheaper version of its Patriot air defense interceptor at the Farnborough International Airshow, announcing that the PAC-3 Adapted Capability Effector, known as PAC-3 ACE, will cost less than half as much per unit as the missile it’s designed to complement, the PAC-3 MSE, which runs roughly $4 million per round […]

TuxBot v3 Evolution, a modular IoT botnet framework capable of infecting devices running architectures ranging from ARM and MIPS to x86_64, PowerPC and RISC-V. The platform appears designed for mass compromise, persistence and distributed denial-of-service operations, with a C-based bot agent and a Go-based command-and-control server. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it recovered the […]

The post LLM-Assisted TuxBot Botnet Targets IoT Devices Across 17 Processor Architectures appeared first on GBHackers Security | #1 Globally Trusted Cyber Security News Platform.

There are a lot of ESP32-based development boards out there– and why not? It’s a versatile chip that can be used in all sorts of situations, and people want boards to match them. Not finding one to his liking that was specifically built for solar powered IoT projects, [Narrow Studios] rolled his own. Well, designed it; like most these days, he’s outsourced the manufacturing to PCBWay, which is where you’ll need to go if you want one.

Why might you want one? Well, if you have similar goals in mind to [Narrow Studios]. He’s put an ESP32-C6 Mini on the board, which means it’s got most of the IoT communications protocols you might be interested in — bluetooth, wifi, Matter, Thread, and Zigbee, too. Ten 10 IO pins have been broken out, plus I2C on a QWIIC connector, which gets you a whole ecosystem of sensors to easily plug into. The “solar” part is justified by the inclusion of a BQ25186 linear battery charging IC from Texas Instruments, with the designated solar power input protected against reverse voltage in case you– like this author– have let magic smoke out by hooking things up backwards. Is it embarrassing? Yes. Does it happen? Also yes, so putting protection on the board is a nice feature. [Narrow Studios] released a video that we’ve embedded below discussing his design choices and demonstrating the device, but the project page can give you the gist.

Of course there’ve been plenty of solar-powered projects to feature the ESP32 here before– you can even use it for maximum power point tracking— but this dev board might be exactly what someone is looking for to build their next IoT project, so we’re thankful to [Narrow Studios] for the tip.

 

Philips is replacing Hue Bridge Pro devices after a software update left several units bricked with no way for users to restore them. Rumblings began in forums in June after a seemingly innocuous update left users, quite literally, in the dark. After a few weeks attempting to resolve the issues, Philips has thrown in the towel and said it will replace affected devices. A spokesperson told The Register, "We have identified a firmware issue affecting a limited number of Philips Hue Bridge Pro devices under a very specific software update scenario. Our data shows that fewer than 100 devices have been impacted." As for the problem itself, "The issue can occur when a Bridge Pro with automatic software updates disabled has remained on an older software version for an extended period, and a software update is then manually installed under a specific set of conditions. "In affected cases, the Bridge Pro can become inoperable and display a red LED, resulting in a loss of connectivity with the Philips Hue app and connected devices." The spokesperson told us that affected users should contact the company's customer support: "All Bridge Pro devices confirmed to have been impacted by this specific issue will be replaced free of charge, regardless of warranty status." Which is great, except that if you have to set up a network of lights and devices again from scratch, that's a substantial amount of work. Backing up a configuration isn't an option at the moment. The Hue Bridge Pro is a hub for the Philips Hue lighting system. It can support more than 150 lights and over 50 accessories. According to Philips, "Equipped with a new chip capable of running complex algorithms and AI-powered features, it's faster and stronger than ever." Except, it appears, when Philips emits an update that bricks some of them. The incident highlights the risks associated with smart homes and their devices. Support could be abruptly pulled, the device's origin might not be what you expect, or, as in the case of the Philips Hue Bridge Pro, a firmware update could leave a device hopelessly bricked. Philips should be commended for its replacement plan, particularly when a device is out of warranty, although questions remain about its validation and qualification procedures. As for the device itself, Philips released an update on Monday to address the issue (where devices haven't been bricked) and urged users to enable automatic updates to receive the firmware update as it rolls out. ®

VEXAIoT, an autonomous multi-agent framework designed to discover and exploit vulnerabilities in the Internet of Things (IoT) within controlled test environments. In 200 attack trials against the intentionally vulnerable IoTGoat platform, the system completed 189 attacks, achieving an overall success rate of 94.5% (rounded to 95%). New VEXAIoT AI Agents Attack Workflow VEXAIoT, short for […]

The post New VEXAIoT AI Agents Autonomously Exploit IoT Vulnerabilities With 95% Success Rate appeared first on GBHackers Security | #1 Globally Trusted Cyber Security News Platform.

Google announced that it helped take down NetNut, a 2 million strong malicious residential proxy network. The incident highlights the growing risks posed by residential proxy networks that quietly conscript consumer devices into services used by cybercriminals and nation-state actors alike.

The post Residential Proxy Risks: Understanding Google’s Latest Action Against 2 Million Strong NetNut appeared first on The Security Ledger with Paul F. Roberts.

Bitcoin Magazine

Bull Bitcoin Files Landmark Legal Challenge to Annul France’s DAC8 Crypto Data Surveillance Rules

Bull Bitcoin exchange, recently licensed under MiCA, is challenging the European directive in French courts that sets up a mass surveillance database, putting millions of crypto users at risk. 

Bull Bitcoin, the world’s oldest Bitcoin-only and non-custodial exchange, recently licensed under MiCA by France’s financial markets regulator AMF, has filed a legal challenge before the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme administrative court. The challenge seeks to annul Decree No. 2025-1276, the main measure transposing the European DAC8 directive into French law, on the grounds that it creates a massive surveillance grid and database that institutions can not secure from leaks and data hacks, ultimately putting civilians at risk of kidnapping and physical harm. 

Alongside the legal action, the company is making dac8.com public: “a complete, fully sourced resource for citizens, journalists and policymakers,” according to a press release shared with Bitcoin Magazine. 

In recent years, there has been an alarming rise in kidnappings and physical attacks on crypto users, most concentrated in Europe, with France being an epicenter. Organized crime seems to be exploiting poor data reporting laws of law-abiding crypto users who, by paying their taxes, expose their ownership of crypto assets. Given that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not reversible and can be transferred internationally with ease, criminals are hunting down crypto users. France has had the second most physical attacks on crypto users after the USA, which has a much larger population, according to Gart, a company dedicated to protecting users from this rising threat.

High-profile figures in the Bitcoin and broader crypto industry have been targeted in recent years, such as Binance France CEO David Prinçay and Ledger co-founder David Balland, who lost a finger during the incident, among many others. Jameson Lopp, co-founder of Casa, a high-security Bitcoin and Ethereum wallet company, has organized ‘wrench attack’ data for years in a database on GitHub showing an accelerating trend of attacks. 

Bull Bitcoin argues in its legal challenge to the DAC8 that further consolidation and sharing of crypto user data will only perpetuate this trend of physical attacks. However, they also argue that these personal security risks created by the DAC8 are also working against the stated intentions of the regulations. They argue that users will simply find legal alternatives to centralized, regulated exchanges, opting to purchase the assets off the grid via peer-to-peer exchanges, home mining or offshore unregulated alternatives, making tax collection even more difficult.

User Data Honey Pots

DAC8 turns the natural incentive a company has to protect its users’ data into a valuable multinational database with many entry points, which cybersecurity experts have for a long time called a honey pot. Bull Bitcoin points out that regulated crypto-asset service providers (CASPs) under MiCA, DORA and the GDPR are supervised, sanctionable professionals with financial incentives to protect their customers. DAC8, in turn, does the opposite: it moves data into administrative reporting networks where access is broader, and accountability is harder for users to assess. The security of the whole — Bull Bitcoin concludes — is then only as strong as its weakest link. 

The history of data security over the past decades shows that amassing user data and keeping it safe over time is very difficult. Just this year, the French National Agency for Secure Credentials (ANTS, also known as France Titres) suffered a major breach detected on April 15, 2026, exposing data from up to 11.7–19 million accounts. Compromised information included login IDs, full names, email addresses, dates of birth, account identifiers, and, in some cases, postal addresses, places of birth, and phone numbers. 

Months earlier, the French National Bank account registry also suffered a major hack, exposing data tied to approximately 1.2 million accounts. The compromised information included IBANs, account holder names, addresses, and, in some cases, tax identification numbers, though officials stated the attacker could not view balances or conduct transactions.

In the United States, the situation is not much better. The Equifax Data Breach in 2017 affected 147 million Americans, and the National Public Data Breach of 2024 affected over 200 million Americans, leading to leaks of social security numbers among other critical information. And back in 2015, the Office of Personal Management of the U.S. government was also breached, compromising a large number of U.S. Government officials. The data stolen included everything from social security numbers to medical records. 

The list of such breaches is long, and the only logical conclusion to draw from it is that the less user information that ends up in these honeypots, the better, as ultimately all of these hacks put civilians at risk either from physical attacks or from identity-theft related fraud. 

Families On the Front Lines

Of the many issues identified by Bull Bitcoin and documented on the DAC8 website, the most alarming one might be how even individuals who have not purchased crypto might end up harmed by this concentration of data, just by familial association with a Bitcoiner or crypto user.

Citing data by Certik, Bull Bitcoin highlights that more than half of the violent incidents recorded in 2026 against crypto owners targeted a family member — spouse, child, elderly parent — as a direct victim or as a pressure lever over the key holder. On the topic, Bull Bitcoin assets that  “DAC8 therefore exposes not only crypto-asset holders, but their entire close family circle: between 40 and 135 million Europeans fall into a physical-risk zone, without any of them ever having consented.”

Francis Pouliot, CEO of Bull Bitcoin considers this overreach into the privacy of Euroeans to be potentially catastrophic for the prosperity of the continent, he minced no words in the press release saying that “DAC8 has transformed the concept of Know Your Customer into Kill Your Customer.” He added, “We cannot let the very foundations of civilization be shattered by this attack on privacy rights. We must draw a line in the sand and refuse to cede any more territory before we have nothing left. Someone must take a stand. It appears that no one else is willing and able to do so. Therefore, it falls to BULL to lead this fight.”

The DAC8.com is rich with facts, figures, official sources (EUR-Lex, OECD, Legifrance) and analysis, in French, English and other European languages for those interested in reviewing it and freely using it.

This post Bull Bitcoin Files Landmark Legal Challenge to Annul France’s DAC8 Crypto Data Surveillance Rules first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Juan Galt.

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