Raoul Chiesa is a Senior Advisor on Strategic Alliances & Cybercrime Issues at the Global Crimes Unit for the United Nations Interregional Crime & Justice Research Institute, a Member of the Permanent Stakeholders Group at the European Network & Information Security Agency, and is also the founder of Mediaservice.net, a security advisory company.

Chiesa was supposed to give his presentation called " The Underground Economy " at Hack in The Box. The Underground Economy is about how criminals succeed in finding loopholes in ATM systems, which is then exploited to steal big sums of money. According to ENISA fraude with ATM machines costs banks over 500 million euros a year.

According to Dhillon Kannabhiran, organizer of the Hack in the Box conference, Chiesa has responsibly informed the ATM vendors quite some time ago, given them enough time to fix the security leak. The vendors didn't do anything about it and are now threatening Chiesa to have him arrested.

Raoul Chiesa was replaced at the last minute by Job de Haas, giving a presentation on Side Channel Analysis on Embedded Systems.


Update: The presentation being cancelled due to legal threats by ATM vendors seems to be a rumour, please read the follow-up article.