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A Winnipeg BMO branch got an unlikely security tip from two 14-year-olds when the pair managed to get into an ATM’s operating system during their lunch break last Wednesday.

The Grade 9 students, Matthew Hewlett and Caleb Turon, used an ATM operators’ manual they found online to get into the administrator mode of an ATM at a Safeway grocery store. They saw how much money was in the machine, how many transactions there had been and other information usually off-limits for the average bank customer.

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“We thought it would be fun to try it, but we were not expecting it to work,” Hewlett told the Winnipeg Sun. “When it did, it asked for a password.”

They managed to crack the password on the first try, a result of BMO’s machine using one of the factory default passwords that had apparently never been changed.

They took this information to a nearby BMO branch, where staff were at first skeptical of what the two high-schoolers were telling them. Hewlett and Turon headed back to the Safeway to get proof, coming back with printouts from the ATM that clearly showed the machine had been compromised.