While I realise that the ATM runs on software, the full implications of this did not hit me until today when I had to wait until the ATM rebooted. Looking at the whole booting up sequence for NT 4 and seeing it do a virus scan did not really fill me with confidence towards the machine. In addition to this the ATM boot procedure stopped a long time with a view of the classic windows desktop with the icons for my documents and internet explorer showing.
The moral of the story is that the less you know the more you are able to trust. This means that trust is inversly proportional to the amount of relevant information. In other words if you talk about how secure a system is then you force people to become concerned with security when they really did not consider the system to be insecure. Showing the NT4 boot and the virus scan is obviously not done to inspire confidence but seeing it happen made me think about the vunerability of these systems.