A new threat rises, in the (near) East
According to this week’s New Scientist, there is a new threat to our credit cards from Russia, which the banks and everyone else totally overlooked. Yet it is obvious, even without hindsight.
The why is obvious - millions of dollars there for the taking.
The how is very neat - a card is used to extract a printout of the other cards used, and their PINs, and it even encrypts the info so that the boss doesn’t have to get his hands dirty, and the foot soldier can’t steal the info for himself. Perhaps the funniest element is the fact there was also a way to have the cash machine eject the cash cassette! Surely anyone with a brain would see that as an obvious issue?
Windows is known to have many hundreds of thousands of viri, malware and trojan bits of software installed on the millions of machines in use, so how come did no-one at the banks think about how it might be an issue to use an ATM based on Windows?
These scams show that not only were most banks useless at their expert field of not going bankrupt, but they also messed up badly when working outside their chosen specialist subjects.
You can read the article in full here (though in a few weeks it will be subscribers only for the full article.)