What can help steal your credit card info?

Contactless payment cards have radio frequency identification tags in them which can be read from a distance by using a scanner. The same RFID technology ensures the operation of building access cards and transport cards. Therefore, data on all types of contactless cards are not secure.

A number of publications, such as NBC New York and The Sun, have conducted experiments showing that contactless card information can be stolen at close range. To do this, experts simply held a reader disguised as an iPad to the victim’s pocket, wallet, or bag. Now, scammers don’t even need to buy any devices to do this. Google Play has apps that can be used for the same purpose.

If you are in a public place where a lot of people have gathered, the risk of such fraud increases significantly.

What information can be stolen?

As a result of using RFID readers, fraudsters can get access to different types of data, for example, credit card numbers, information about the expiration date of the card. This data is sufficient for resale on the darknet, and after this information is supplemented with other personal information, it could be used for making transactions on a number of sites or opening an account in your name. If a fraudster has received part of your personal data, the chance that they will receive all the information necessary for making a transaction or opening an account increases significantly. At the same time, security experts say that 80% of credit cards are compromised in some way.  Their data was stolen as a result of phishing, skimming, malicious software on websites, fraudulent phone calls, and data violations.

How to protect your cards from skimming and other types of fraud

Of course, credit card companies are trying to improve the technology with encryption, but thieves are also using increasingly advanced technologies that allow them to steal personal information.

Therefore, we recommend that you follow the simplest preventive security measures against RFID skimming:

• Do not store your cards in your pockets or money clip wallets. Only in your wallet, and your wallet is in a zippered bag. The wallet must have a separate slot for each card so that you can see each card in its place.
• Use a special blocking wallet, holder, or blocking card to protect your contactless card from skimming. Do not wrap the cards in foil, it is not intended for shielding.
• If you see someone holding a mobile phone next to your wallet or bag, or acting strangely in the checkout line, step back and ask the store’s staff for help.
• Before using the card anywhere, check for card skimmers.
• Use one card for autopay accounts and the other for everyday purchases. The autopay and everyday strategy helps you save your money and personal data.
• Do not store photos of your cards on your phone, or write their data to your phone.
• Keep cards that you don’t use at home in a safe place. You can also keep a list of all your card numbers, expiration dates, and security codes, as well as contact information in case your cards, are ever stolen.
• Destroy any documents containing your credit card information, including documents containing the last 4 digits.
• Keep track of your account statements. If you see a suspicious purchase, immediately notify the card Issuer.
• Periodically check the personal accounts of the online stores that you use most often (Amazon, Target, etc.). if you find any transactions that were not made by you, contact the seller immediately.
• If someone asks you to provide your card details over the phone on behalf of the card Issuer, do not agree. Call the customer support number on the back of your card and ask the Issuer’s representative what to do in this case.
• Use a credit card instead of a debit card whenever possible. In General, the losses will be less if the thief drains your credit limit, rather than having access to funds from your debit card. If your debit card is compromised, you may lose access to all the money in your current account until the Bank deals with the fraud. This could take several days.
• Periodically change your passwords and update your card pin codes.

Keep your data and funds safe at all times.

‘If you are worried about someone reading your cards, there are several RFID blocking products that can prevent skimming.

The post Can someone steal your credit card info from your pocket? appeared first on RFID Cloaked - Protecting your RFID personal data.

The relay attack is also known as the “chess grandmaster attack”, by analogy to the ruse in which someone who doesn’t know how to play chess can beat an expert: the player simultaneously challenges two grandmasters to an online game of chess, and uses the moves chosen by the first grandmaster in the game against the second grandmaster, and vice versa. By relaying the opponents moves between the games, the player appears to be a formidable opponent to both grandmasters, and will win (or at least force a draw) in one match.

Similarly, in a relay attack the fraudster’s fake card doesn’t know how to respond properly to the payment terminal because, unlike a genuine card, it doesn’t contain the cryptographic key known only to the card and the bank that verifies the card is genuine. But like the fake chess grandmaster, the fraudster can relay the communication of the genuine card in place of the fake card.

For example, the victim’s card (Alice, in the diagram below) would be in a fake or hacked card payment terminal (Bob) and the criminal would use the fake card (Carol) to attempt a purchase in a genuine terminal (Dave). The bank would challenge the fake card to prove its identity, this challenge is then relayed to the genuine card in the hacked terminal, and the genuine card’s response is relayed back on behalf of the fake card to the bank for verification. The end result is that the terminal used for the real purchase sees the fake card as genuine, and the victim later finds an unexpected and expensive purchase on their statement.

Demonstrating the grandmaster attack

I first demonstrated that this vulnerability was real with my colleague Saar Drimer at Cambridge, showing on television how the attack could work in Britain in 2007 and (Play video) in the Netherlands in 2009.

In our scenario, the victim put their card in a fake terminal thinking they were buying a coffee when in fact their card details were relayed by a radio link to another shop, where the criminal used a fake card to buy something far more expensive. The fake terminal showed the victim only the price of a cup of coffee, but when the bank statement arrives later the victim has an unpleasant surprise.

At the time, the banking industry agreed that the vulnerability was real, but argued that as it was difficult to carry out in practice it was not a serious risk. It’s true that, to avoid suspicion, the fraudulent purchase must take place within a few tens of seconds of the victim putting their card into the fake terminal. But this restriction only applies to the Chip and PIN contact cards available at the time. The same vulnerability applies to today’s contactless cards, only now the fraudster need only be physically near the victim at the time – contactless cards can communicate at a distance, even while the card is in the victim’s pocket or bag.

While we had to build hardware ourselves (from off-the-shelf components) to demonstrate the relay attack, today it can be carried out with any modern smartphone equipped with near-field communication chips, which can read or imitate contactless cards. All a criminal needs is two cheap smartphones and some software – which could be sold on the black market, if it is not already available. This change is likely the reason why, years after our demonstration, the industry has developed a defence against the relay attack, but only for contactless cards.

Closing the loophole

The industry’s defence is based on a design that Saar and I developed at the same time that we demonstrated the vulnerability, called distance bounding. When the terminal challenges the card to prove its identity, it measures how long the card takes to respond. During a genuine transaction there should be very little delay, but a fake card will take longer to respond because it is relaying the response of the genuine card, located much further away. The terminal will notice this delay, and cancel the transaction.

We set the maximum delay to 20 nanoseconds – the time it takes a radio signal to travel six metres; this would guarantee the genuine card is no further away than this from the terminal. However, the contactless card designers made some compromises in order to be compatible with the hundreds of thousands of terminals already in use, which allows far less precise timing. The card specification sets the maximum delay the terminal allows at two milliseconds: that’s 2m nanoseconds, during which a radio signal could travel 600 kilometres.

Clearly this doesn’t offer the same guarantees as our design, but it would still represent a substantial obstacle to criminals. While it’s enough time for the radio signal to travel far, it’s still a very short window for the software to process the transaction. When we demonstrated the relay attack it regularly introduced delays of hundreds or even thousands of milliseconds.

It will be years before the new secure cards reach customers, and even then only some: there is only one Chip and PIN specification, but there are seven specifications for contactless cards, and only the MasterCard variant includes this defence. It’s not perfect, but it makes pragmatic compromises that should prevent smartphones being used by fraudsters as tools for the relay attack. The sort of custom-designed hardware that could still defeat this protection would require expertise and expense to build – and the banks will hope that they can stay ahead of the criminals until the arrival of whatever replaces contactless cards in the future.

Steven J. Murdoch is a member of The Tor Project and employee of VASCO.

http://nr.news-republic.com/Web/ArticleWeb.aspx?regionid=4&articleid=70003692&source=viber

The post How contactless cards are still vulnerable to relay attack appeared first on RFID Cloaked - Protecting your RFID personal data.

Original article from the www.independent.co.uk

A man on a train appears to be scanning for contactless payment bank cards to make payment under £30 unauthorised.

A Facebook post which claims to show a man using a contactless card reader to steal money from members of the public has got some people worried about the security of their bank accounts.

The image, which first appeared in Russian media, shows a man standing on public transport holding a mobile card reader in his hand.

It is claimed that by keying an amount into the terminal and holding it against the pockets of unsuspecting targets, he could steal money out of their accounts via their contactless cards.

There’s not much context to the picture, and there’s nothing to suggest the man is a new kind of ‘digital pickpocket’. But it’s theoretically possible to steal money in this way, and it’s got some people worried.

Some card machines in shops, cafes and restaurants need to be connected to a landline terminal to work. More advanced devices, which are common across the country, use GPRS to make a connection – allowing merchants to take card payments almost anywhere.

If a thief had one of these GPRS-enabled machines, they would be able to ‘skim’ victims’ contactless cards almost anywhere, without them knowing.

However, most banks require their customers to have a business bank account if they want to take card payments – starting one of these accounts naturally involves handing over personal information to the bank, making the criminal traceable if a victim noticed the transaction on their statement.

Customers could get a refund from the bank if they spotted the fraudulent activity, and if the bank traced the theft to the criminal’s account, they could get shut down. But by that point, it might be too late.

Read more.

The post Contactless card theft: users warned to watch out for digital pickpockets appeared first on RFID Cloaked - Protecting your RFID personal data.

We recommend you to read this article. RFID Cloaked company’s experts don’t agree with this opinion. We have seen examples of cloning and scanning attacks and have duplicated a hacked RFID scanner to prove the concept works. RFID contactless cards can be scanned, copied, and cloned and unauthorized payments made. We write about this in our blog. For example. This article describes in detail the techniques for hacking RFID using NFC smartphones.

Reference to CSO article →

We have read comments on this issue. Users disagreed with the columnist. Here are some of them.

Tamera Selhaver

I think the author is clueless. My husband and I had all of our debit card numbers stolen while shopping together. He rarely carries his wallet as I always have my purse so it was easy to figure out exactly what location we were at when we got “scanned.” All our debit cards except one credit card (already had smart chip technology) were stolen. Of course now all of our debit cards have smart chips so this is “supposedly” a moot point. But 4 years ago I was first in line for a protective wallet after getting tired of tinfoil. Never had another issue but was super careful about even taking a card out to slide and pay. I don’t see it taking that long before they figure out how to get around the chip. Nothing is foolproof.

Koruma Wallets
Sooner or later all cards will be contactless with RFID feature. In Europe this kind of cards is more and more popular. Sometimes people like it and sometimes hate.Our answer to this article is “Better safe than sorry”.

John Smith
Nice how the author has zero response to any of these comments!! Someone is wrong here and he wont even debate or defend this article.

Anonymous
American Express notified me that someone tried to charge a $404.00 meal in Las Vegas. They denied it and cancelled my card. I had been to a shopping mall but had not used my card. Only used my card at CostCo.

Ryan Swan
Your card was probably cloned. Happens all the time. You probably inserted your card into a reader with a skimmer. If that isnt the case then someone randomly got your cards 16 digits by chance. They recycle the numbers because they have all been used by now.

Rockinon Ldn
Lots and lots of cards in Canada are RFID enabled. Once my wife’s card was read from more than a foot away by a more powerful than usual card reader at a cashier’s counter. My inexpensive wallet, purchased at Costco, is RFID proof. After seeing my wife’s card read from some distance, I’m pleased to have my RFID proof wallet. And do we use the RFID feature? All the time!

Ryan J
Use a faraday bag for your phone when traveling, or in risky areas. Use them when you’re on the move if you feel like you’re being tracked. These used to be “paranoid” concerns but not so much these days. They offer a level of assurance that provides peace of mind. Yes, you can’t receive calls when the phone is inside the bag, but you’re only using the bag when you feel you may be at risk. Attending a large conference? Good time to use a faraday bag. Think about it people, all the data you possess is on that little device just begging to be taken. Make sure you don’t buy a tin foil piece of crap anti-static bag though, I’ve tried those and they don’t work. They’re marketed as “faraday bags” but they most certainly are not. Buy a dual paired seam forensic faraday bag and you will be safe.

Nate Abshire
Wow, you’re terribly misinformed. Your article is practically a joke. In Canada yes, most major credit cards DO in fact transmit. It’s never been more important to secure your cards in an RFID transmission blocking case than these days. Do some research before laying down a couple grand worth of useless words.

Ray Croft
Just because i am paranoid, that does not mean that they are not after me!

Gage Merrell
Is this guy joking? Almost everyone in Canada has an RFID enabled card now… It’s the easiest way to way for our Tim Hortons after all. Are the RFID blockers the only way to protect your credit card? Of course not. Is it a terrible idea to have one built in anyways? Again, of course not. It is difficult for me to agree any additional protection is meaningless. I also understand that the USA is significantly behind in payment security, I work with payment security equipment everyday, but here in Canada, contactless pay has become very popular.

Bek O’Toole
I work in a small country town bag shop and we sell RFID protection in most of our wallets/purses etc. In the last 3 days I have had 2 customers who’s money has been stolen in this way. One poor bloke had $2000 an the other nearly $300. I get customers all the time coming in BECAUSE their money has been stolen in this way. It is a small country town as well, not a city and it still happens all the time. Where is he getting his evidence from?

Gethin Hill
Haha is this guy for real? Security Adviser? If you hired this guy for your security, i’d be very worried.. 40 computer certifications and eight books and he’s giving this kind of advice?

Gertjan Assies
That’s a pretty ignorant point of view, since 2008 it is possible to wirelessly do small payments without using a pin. so a mobile device with a amount less then 25 euro/dollar/pound entered and a busy public transport system is all it takes.

Dean Oliffe
Totally disagree with this article and it sounds like a editorial piece for the industry pushing this payment method. Personally anything to do with security of users banking accounts (access etc) should be secured with a PIN. Then if the user wishes to Opt in to Paywave or paypass etc then that should be their choice alone. The two vendors and the banks should be focused on the security of our funds and not half arsed implementations when all the required functionality, trust and user understanding for PIN’s exists already. It’s articles like this that get me going. We can of course agree to disagree, but as I can see from the other comments this article doesn’t get much in real world support.

Adam Bruce
You need to check your statistics mate, “If you look at the number of credit cards with RFID, you can’t even represent it statistically. It’s not 0 percent, but it’s so far below 1 percent that it might as well be 0 percent ”

In the UK these cards are becoming widely adopted, If you look at the UK card associatoin website http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/contactless_contactless_statistics/ you will see that there are currently almost 80 million contactless card in use in the UK, meaining most people have more than one.

Sharon Johnson
My debit card doesn’t have an RFID chip. It has the strip on the back. My card was read while out and $2000 was stolen out of my bank. The card was never out of my possession. It happened just hours after using it at Walmart.

Eric Shook
Your card was likely cloned when you paid, not read by an rfid scanner…

Pete Dee
The main reason that the secure chips on the credit cards were that the pay phones were being pried open by the immigrants in France to get any coins in the pay phones. These chips are so secure now the US Military ID’s have these chips on them. What does that say for security. My new Mastercard has that chip and 99% of the places i shop don’t use the chip feature. Walmart is the only company I know that has their cash registers chip readers enabled. this secure chip is the wave of the future Recently in Paris France the parking spots were chip credit cards only so finding a parking spot and paying for it is a lot more difficult with out the credit card with the chip

Sarah West
With such a low adoption level in the USA, it’s hardly surprising there won’t have been many reports of problems. That doesn’t mean that things can’t go wrong.

Here in the UK, it’s now very difficult to get a new bank card without contactless payment enabled. Many banks simply don’t do them and contactless readers are everywhere now. The UK Cards Association released statistics showing that in November 2015, there were 78.3 million contactless payment cards in circulation in the UK. That’s in a country with a population below 70 million. See http://www.theukcardsassociation.org.uk/contactless_contactless_statistics/

With such widespread use, there have been a number of problems. Accidental payments are reported to have taken place more than once at one of the UK’s leading retailers, Marks & Spencer (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/10066187/Marks-and-Spencer-customer-fears-over-contactless-payments.html).

Only two days ago, Roi Perez, a community manager for SC computer security magazine was featured in my local newspaper after having discovered an unauthorized debit from his card. Read the article at http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/14218067.How_safe_is_your_contactless_card__Security_expert_says_his_was_hacked_with_a_suspicious__bump__on_the_train/

Roger Gong
All my credit cards are wireless payment enabled, as the wireless payment won’t require the user to key in PIN or any identification secret, I’m sure the bad guys are able to steal your money by using a device functionally similar to the wireless payment terminal when you don’t have some kind of signal blocking wallet.

David Brodbeck
In theory they could do that, but the RFID payment system is generally limited to small transactions, and each transaction is a one-time challenge-response exchange where the card has to be present (you can’t just store the info and use it again later). So our theoretical thief would have to sit there making small transactions as people walked by. He’d be better off getting a job as a waiter and just taking a picture of every card he was handed.
Also, consumers don’t have to pay for fraudulent charges — the bank or merchant has to eat the cost. They’re the ones who stand to lose the most from theft, so if they’re issuing these cards, it clearly isn’t a concern for them.

Lee Adkins
Maximum charge in the UK is £30, unskilled workers probably average £45 a day after tax so with just two swipes you’re up £15. Get 5-6 and you are close to not having to work for a week.

I don’t believe its going to be a really prevalent form of attack however I wouldn’t discount desperate people attempting it. I agree with you that the banks are pretty good at refunding fraudulent activity as I’ve had it happen myself (I suspect from a large database hack as I’m careful where I use it) and if it did become an epidemic of sorts they would soon do something about it.

WeWomenAreMore
I now really would like to know how far away one has to be in order to steal the card infos? Are we talking about meters or centimeters?
Here in Austria one could get away with 80Euros, when using the card 4times until we have to put in our PIN again.

WeWomenAreMore
You don’t want to tell me that it is enough to have a photo of a card with RFID in order for everyone using it for payments? This really would be scary!

Cliff Crabtree
Putting a Faraday cage around your smart phone would be far more effective. You could not make or receive phone calls until it was removed though. The RFID blocking products would probably not have gotten any kind of a foothold on the market if smart phone payment systems had been widely deployed first.

Thus, we are once again confirmed in the opinion that RFID blocking technology is still necessary.

‘Want to learn more about RFID protection? See the information in our online-shop

Edited in August 2020

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