03 March 2003 12:00am

Discovering somebody's PIN for an ATM Card may be a much easier task for a motivated bank insider than previous assumptions within banks. So easy, say two University of Cambridge researchers that a crook programmer could generate enough PIN's in the course of one lunch break to steal £2 million.

Mike Bond and Piotr Zielinski contend that it would take an insider about 15 guesses, rather than the intended 5,000 guesses, to crack an ATM PIN. One reason is that PIN numbers are not randomly generated, but generated via a relatively simple algorithm that derives the PIN from the...