Thursday, September 29, 2005

Fraudster gadget at Bank ATM


A team of organized criminals are installing equipment on legitimate bank ATM's in at least 2 regions to steal both the ATM card number and the PIN. The team sits nearby in a car receiving the information transmitted wirelessly over weekends and evenings from equipment they install on the front of the ATM (see photos). If you see an attachment like this, do not use the ATM and report it immediately to the bank using the phone on the front of the ATM.

The equipment used to capture your ATM card number and PIN are cleverly disguised to look like normal ATM equipment. A "skimmer" is mounted to the front of the normal ATM card slot that reads the ATM card number and transmits it to the criminals sitting in a nearby car.

At the same time, a wireless camera is disguised to look like a leaflet holder and is mounted in a position to view ATM PIN entries.

The thieves copy the cards and use the PIN numbers to withdraw thousands from many accounts in a very short time directly from the bank ATM.





Equipment being installed on front of existing bank card slot.



The equipment as it appears installed over the normal ATM bank slot.



The PIN reading camera being installed on the ATM is housed in an innocent looking leaflet enclosure.



The camera shown installed and ready to capture PIN's by looking down on the keypad as you enter your PIN

Thursday, September 22, 2005

Bitching about White Ants

You don’t know they are there until it’s too late.

They are the unseen enemy.

Each year, the damages caused by this insects are more than the total damages from floods and fires combined.

On September 11, 2005, teacher Chan Boon Heng of SRJK (C) Keat Hwa (K) in Jalan Seberang Perak dies of internal injuries when he plunged 15 feet down due to the collapse of the plywood floorboard in the school which had been infested by white ants.

Chan was at the school’s office located on the first floor at 7.30am when the rotting wooden plywood floorboard suddenly gave way, and he plunged 15 feet down onto the hard cement floor below. He was rushed to a nearby private hospital where he died of internal injuries.

As our governmental system are basically reactive, on September 20, Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishamuddin announced that the government has now approved RM10 million for repairs and upgrading of schools following the death of teacher Chan Boon Heng.

Hishamuddin said the number of schools that needed repair were huge which is why schools deemed “really dangerous” would be given priority. He said he did not blame anyone for the insufficient allocation.

“We have already spent a lot on equipments and computer laboratories."

So, we now hear the mourning over the fact that billions are spent building computer labs, installing Astro and paying multi-millions for the TV programmes and building hostels worth hundreds of millions; but no money to repair and upkeep schools, in particular, national-type schools and religious schools, and no money to repair delapidated bridges in kampungs too.

What caused the plywood floorboards to rot and yet is not visible to the naked eyes?

Termites! White-ants!

Read more here

Balanced Scorecard for the Unbalanced

As requested by my readers, here is a synopsis of Balanced Scorecard.


Harvard Business Review published the article “The Balanced Scorecard – Measures That Drive Performance” which was jointly written by Dr. David Norton (the then CEO of Nolan-Norton and now President of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative-BSCol) and Professor Dr. Robert Kaplan of the Harvard Business School.

The article summarized the findings from an in-depth study of 12 manufacturing and service companies that was carried out in 1990.

The research program set out to design a new approach to performance measurement that dealt with a growing managerial problem – that accounting, or financial, measures were increasingly being found wanting in assessing and managing organizational performance.

Norton and Kaplan premised that what business leaders required was a new mechanism with which it can take a holistic view of organizational performance, thus, providing more than the lagging financial metrics on which most organizations had based their decisions.

Consequently, Norton and Kaplan introduced a new performance measurement framework, which they anmed it: The Balanced Scorecard


Click here to read more on Scorecard