Payment services have become both more convenient and more secure over recent years — but cybercriminals are still managing to steal funds from cards all around the world. What are the most common methods used for such theft, and how can you counteract them?
Card cloning
When cards only stored information on a magnetic strip, it was quite easy for fraudsters to produce an exact copy of a card and use it for payments in stores and withdrawals at ATMs. At first, the data was read with a special device — a skimmer that was mounted on an ATM or a terminal in a store. This was supplemented by a camera or a special pad on the terminal keyboard to find out the card’s PIN code. Having obtained a card dump and a PIN, fraudsters wrote the data to a blank card and used it at an ATM or in a store.
This technology still works in some parts of the world, but the advent of chip cards has greatly reduced its effectiveness. A card with a chip is not so easy to copy. That’s why criminals started infecting payment terminals with malicious code that copies some data from the card while processing a legitimate purchase. Subsequently, the scammers send cleverly generated payment requests using this information. In essence, they only send data that was previously recorded on the magnetic strip, but label the transaction as being conducted by the chip. This is possible where banks don’t cross-reference various transaction parameters in sufficient detail and incorrectly implement the EMV protocols that all chip-card actions must abide by.
With banks that don’t suffer from such laxity, attackers us ..
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