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A banking security researcher has stepped forward to deny reports that vendor threats forced him to cancel a presentation on ATM security at the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam earlier this month.

Many outlets, including El Reg, reported that a presentation on the vulnerabilities and security shortcomings that cyber criminals were using to break into ATMs was cancelled at the last minute due to legal threats against ethical hacker Raoul Chiesa.

"No manufacturer or systems integrator of ATM, nor banking or financial institution, have ever threatened Chiesa or the company Mediaservice.net," the statement explained.

Chiesa's research team has already presented part of this research in European Union security agency ENISA's report ATM Crime: Overview of the European situation and golden rules on how to avoid it last September, and in greater depth at a closed-door conference of ABI, an Italian banking trade group, around the same time.

The Mediaservice.net team remains committed to responsible disclosure despite what it describes as "insufficient measures" in mitigating vulnerabilities by the banking industry. Without going into details, the team cited the tampering of software in Ukrainian bank ATMs by organised crime as among the new generation of threat the industry faces.

"Everything has been a big misunderstanding with HITB [Hack in the Box] staff," Chiesa told El Reg.

"My original presentation, planned to be given at HITB EU on July 2nd 2010, was on the "Underground Economy". It is a presentation I've already given (CONfidence 2010, Troopers 2009, nullcon India 2010) and does not have anything to do with ATMs.

"A couple of weeks before HITB EU, I was speaking internally at my company, if going for Full Disclosure or not, given the critical topic we were working on. I told to Dhillon from HITB EU - we're discussing this internally, I'd love to go for Full Disclosure. If we ever decided this, I'd love to give the talk at HITB, since the delegates are serious and the speaker's level is quite high."

Although the supposed legal threats against Chiesa have been denied, other security researchers have not been so lucky. For example, a presentation on ATM security by Barnaby Jack was pulled from last year's Black Hat, only to be reinstated for this month's show.

Jack has moved from Juniper Networks to IOActive Labs over the last 12 months, a job change that has allowed him to explain how ATM machines might be fooled into dispensing more cash than recorded during a transaction at this year's Black Hat USA.

The "Jackpotting" presentation, which Jack himself compares to the cash machines hack run by John Connor in Terminator 2, is likely to be one of the highlights of this year's conference. ®

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