Credit Cards Can Be Read Through Clothes And Wallets

RFID ShieldForbes – Hacker’s Demo Shows How Easily Credit Cards Can Be Read Through Clothes And Wallets

Pull out your credit card and flip it over. If the back is marked with the words “PayPass,” “Blink,” that triangle of nested arcs that serves as the universal symbol for wireless data or a few other obscure icons, Kristin Paget says it’s vulnerable to an uber-stealthy form of pickpocketing. As she showed on a Washington D.C. stage Saturday, she can read all the data she needs to make a fraudulent transaction off that card with just a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, and do it invisibly through your wallet, purse, or pocket.

At the Shmoocon hacker conference, Paget aimed to indisputably prove what hackers have long known and the payment card industry has repeatedly downplayed and denied: That RFID-enabled credit card data can be easily, cheaply, and undetectably stolen and used for fraudulent transactions. With a Vivotech RFID credit card reader she bought on eBay for $50, Paget wirelessly read a volunteer’s credit card onstage and obtained the card’s number and expiration date, along with the one-time CVV number used by contactless cards to authenticate payments. A second later, she used a $300 card-magnetizing tool to encode that data onto a blank card. And then, with a Square attachment for the iPhone that allows anyone to swipe a card and receive payments, she paid herself $15 of the volunteer’s money with the counterfeit card she’d just created. (She also handed the volunteer a twenty dollar bill, essentially selling the bill on stage for $15 to avoid any charges of illegal fraud.)

If anyone still doubted that the trick had worked, Paget accidentally flashed the volunteer’s credit card number on a screen in front of an audience of hundreds of hackers and security researchers. “You were planning on cancelling that card, weren’t you?” she added somewhat sheepishly.

The scheme, Paget points out, doesn’t involve any hidden bug in the system, but rather the more fundamental problem that any commercially-available RFID reader can read the data from a contactless card as easily as a store’s point-of-sale device does. “Whatever encryption or other security there might be, it doesn’t matter,” she says. “The reader just spits out the number as if I’m the point-of-sales terminal, which is totally stupid. This is an embarrassingly simple hack, but it works.”

Click here for original article at Forbes.com and check out our RFID Shields and RFID Shielding Wallets to protect yourself!