Having cheap, small, full-featured SoCs available is pretty awesome. Just Google for “cool Raspberry Pi projects”, and you’ll find no shortage of lists compiling the genuinely creative uses for diminutive devices. Of course, this kind of creativity isn’t always used for benign uses.
Kaspersky Labs posted about a hack of at least eight Eastern European banks using Raspberry Pis and other small computing devices. These were deployed in meeting rooms and other private locations in the banks with wired access.
From there the script isn’t all that original, but nonetheless devastating. The connected devices would look for any open shared folders, servers, or workstations. Basically anything that might be used for making payments. Then they would try to gain remote access, and inject all sorts of nastiness to obtain sensitive data.
All told, damages were estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.
Source: Kaspersky Labs
