ATM Hacker Dies at 35

Barnaby Jack, the famous ATM hacker, was found dead in his apartment in San Francisco on Thursday. He was only 35 years old.

Jack was born in New Zealand and was previously the director of embedded device security at IOActive, a security assessment company based in Seattle. In 2010, he successfully demonstrated at the Black Hat conference how to hack into ATMs with two different systems and made them spit out cash on the spot. He called this type of hacking "jackpotting," and became famous in the hacking community because of this demonstration.

In fact, Jack originally intended to demonstrate his ATM hacking technique at the Black Hat conference in 2009 but was forced by an ATM manufacturer to delay it for a year. At the time, he was still an employee of that ATM manufacturer.

Jack had planned to demonstrate another highly anticipated hacking technique at the Black Hat conference scheduled for next Wednesday: how to hack into cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers. He had developed a method to infiltrate pacemakers from a distance of up to 50 feet and cause them to release an 830-volt charge lethal enough to kill.

His research had a tremendous impact. After Jack's ATM hacking demonstration, many ATM manufacturers and banks worked hard to address the issue of hacking. Jack also helped Medtronic, a manufacturer of insulin pumps, modify their product design to prevent hacker infiltration.

The police have not disclosed the cause of Barnaby Jack's death. The San Francisco Medical Examiner's Office is conducting an autopsy and has preliminarily ruled out the possibility of murder.