We live in uncertain and what is starting to be unstable times, which makes us look for stability and something to believe in. High reliance on technology and gadgets to make our lives easier requires quite a bit of faith in machines. We even trust them with our money – notice all the ATM’s out there.
Well that trust is starting to be broken. One of the latest forms of theft is putting card “skimmers” over the ones on ATM’s. Over at Krebs on Security, a couple of posts reveal the trickery involved in stealing debit card information. The first shows one skimmer in detail that was found on a Citibank ATM in California. Hard to tell that it wasn’t supposed to be part of the machine.
The follow up post shows a variety of devices that have been found on ATM’s. To successfully capture the data needed to commit debit card fraud, two things are needed: first, the data on the magnetic strip which contains the card numbers, user name, and bank info; the second is some way of recording the PIN number. Tiny pinhole camera’s and fake button pads are the key to the latter and sometimes the info is passed on by a cell phone.
It is an impressive show of old school hardware hacking and with about a billion dollars of ATM fraud a year we’ll be seeing more of it. Check out the professional quality of this gear and think if you would spot it. Most of us are too much in a hurry and I know I haven’t been looking for this kind of thing.
It isn’t just ATM’s that are being rigged this way; gas pumps in Utah have been tampered with as well. Anything that takes a debit card or credit card will be suspect at this rate.
Maybe it is time to go back to carrying cash.
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