Juniper’s Decision To Postpone “Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines”

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Yesterday, Juniper postponed a scheduled Blackhat USA 2009 presentation by one of our employees, Barnaby Jack, entitled "Jackpotting Automated Teller Machines."  This decision has grabbed the attention of the press, the Twittersphere and Blogosphere, and understandably so.

The vulnerability Barnaby was to discuss has far reaching consequences, not only to the affected ATM vendor, but to other ATM vendors and - ultimately - the public. To publicly disclose the research findings before the affected vendor could properly mitigate the exposure would have potentially placed their customers at risk.  That is something we don't want to see happen.

Therefore, we felt it our responsibility to delay the presentation until all those protection measures were put into place.  Unfortunately, there isn't enough time before Blackhat to make that happen.

We did not arrive at this decision easily.  Indeed, we feel that Barnaby's research is important, vital to the advancement of the state of security and should be discussed in an open forum.  However, Juniper is also committed to the responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities, and to protecting the public from them.

We look forward to sharing our findings with the security community in time and, rest assured, we will.