Skip to main content

Contactless Credit Card and ID Card Skimming

This news post was brought to my attention, showing a steel-woven wallet to keep RFID credit cards safe. To some this may sound a bit far fetched and to others nothing new or to worry about, but hear me out.

With new contactless credit cards you can make small purchases without resorting to the Chip-and-PIN transaction that is most common. Instead, you just 'touch' your card on the reader and away you go. The problem with this is that you cannot turn your card off. I can bring the reader to you; I just need proximity. These readers are small and pocketable, and I can read your card without you taking it out of your pocket. The more high-powered my reader, the further away from you I can be to read your card. Initially, the cards gave out the name on the card, the card number and the expiration date. After people showed that it was easy to skim this information off the card, most have removed the cardholder's name from this list. They have also introduced transaction IDs to help protect the cards from being cloned. However, as the introduction of RFID identity cards increases, we will be giving the cardholder's name out again on those.

It has been argued that it is more productive to attack the databases of card details, and still far too easy, so people won't bother trying to read the cards in your wallet. However, I can still obtain a legitimate payment reader and just read your details off and collect your money directly, even if I can't clone the card. In the UK, these contactless transactions are for small amounts of money (£5-£10 typically), but I can collect that from you without your knowledge in a variety of ways. I can use a small pocket device to take a payment from your card directly, but this has to be one at a time and, in some countries, only for small amounts of money. (See the video below for a mobile phone that can process contactless credit card transactions.)




Maybe this isn't worth it to anyone but a petty criminal, but it is relatively easy and cheap. Another way would be to go to a crowded area (public celebrations or gatherings of tens or hundreds of thousands of people for example) and use a high-powered reader to read lots of cards at once. If I can steal £10 from 100,000 people, that's £1m in an afternoon! Somewhere in the region of half a million people gather in Trafalgar Square, and environ, for the New Year celebrations and similar numbers for the Chinese New Year celebrations a little while later.

RFID readers are all over the place and we don't pay them any mind. Shops use RFID readers to catch shoplifters at the entrances. Do you categorically know that they aren't reading your cards instead of catching shoplifters? Would you notice an extra £10 transaction in a shop that you did buy something in? All of our buses and tube stations in London use RFID readers for ticketing. A vast number of commuters will have their Oyster card in their wallet or purse along with their other cards. They don't remove the Oyster card to touch it, they just touch the whole wallet. I could read the other card information at the same time. In fact, do we know that these details aren't logged and just ignored? If they are logged, then maybe we could attack Transport for London's computer system and extract people's credit card details.

Maybe people won't do this with credit cards. What about large banks or other companies that use RFID door entry cards and ID cards? I could read their ID and possibly gain access to their building. Will the ID give me a username to work with? If I can gain physical access to a bank building then I have a huge array of attack vectors at my disposal; it is critical to keep the hackers out.
Even if a hacker can't clone these types of cards, they can still collect information about people and about companies. It is perfectly possible to identify all the employees of a company using RFID cards for door entry, as you can have a high-powered reader near their entrance or at public transport stations. This now gives a social engineer a target and some information to use. Maybe we should all be holding our wallets over the top of shop gates and away from other readers or buy one of the shielded wallets from people like ID Stronghold or Herrington.

Comments

  1. Great Site..)) Keep posting. One of the genuine information on this portal. Thank you very much for sharing with us this article.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Coventry Building Society Grid Card

Coventry Building Society have recently introduced the Grid Card as a simple form of 2-factor authentication. It replaces memorable words in the login process. Now the idea is that you require something you know (i.e. your password) and something you have (i.e. the Grid Card) to log in - 2 things = 2 factors. For more about authentication see this post . How does it work? Very simply is the answer. During the log in process, you will be asked to enter the digits at 3 co-ordinates. For example: c3, d2 and j5 would mean that you enter 5, 6 and 3 (this is the example Coventry give). Is this better than a secret word? Yes, is the short answer. How many people will choose a memorable word that someone close to them could guess? Remember, that this isn't a password as such, it is expected to be a word and a word that means something to the user. The problem is that users cannot remember lots of passwords, so remembering two would be difficult. Also, having two passwords isn't real

Trusteer or no trust 'ere...

...that is the question. Well, I've had more of a look into Trusteer's Rapport, and it seems that my fears were justified. There are many security professionals out there who are claiming that this is 'snake oil' - marketing hype for something that isn't possible. Trusteer's Rapport gives security 'guaranteed' even if your machine is infected with malware according to their marketing department. Now any security professional worth his salt will tell you that this is rubbish and you should run a mile from claims like this. Anyway, I will try to address a few questions I raised in my last post about this. Firstly, I was correct in my assumption that Rapport requires a list of the servers that you wish to communicate with; it contacts a secure DNS server, which has a list already in it. This is how it switches from a phishing site to the legitimate site silently in the background. I have yet to fully investigate the security of this DNS, however, as most

Web Hosting Security Policy & Guidelines

I have seen so many websites hosted and developed insecurely that I have often thought I should write a guide of sorts for those wanting to commission a new website. Now I have have actually been asked to develop a web hosting security policy and a set of guidelines to give to project managers for dissemination to developers and hosting providers. So, I thought I would share some of my advice here. Before I do, though, I have to answer why we need this policy in the first place? There are many types of attack on websites, but these can be broadly categorised as follows: Denial of Service (DoS), Defacement and Data Breaches/Information Stealing. Data breaches and defacements hurt businesses' reputations and customer confidence as well as having direct financial impacts. But surely any hosting provider or solution developer will have these standards in place, yes? Well, in my experience the answer is no. It is true that they are mostly common sense and most providers will conform