It sounds like a recipe for disaster, it's introducing an extra point of possible failure for any software distribution you perform. Lets face it, distributed deployments to thousands (servers), if not hundresds of thousands(clients) are hairy enough at the best of times.

All it takes is someone to forget to update the whitelist and you've just killed your entire atm network with an update. If you automate the process, what's to ensure that it's exactly the file you were expecting

do people try and install dodgy software on ATMs? Does it happen a lot?

:(

please take pity on me