The golden age of credit card fraud is drawing to a close

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in security on (#2SZD)
The US is about to finally embrace the secure chip-based authentication system called EMV-the standard was pioneered by Europay, MasterCard, and Visa-that the rest of the world has already adopted. Pushed by mounting fraud costs, credit card companies have crafted incentives for merchants to switch to the sophisticated readers needed to accept the cards. "There was a lot of skepticism about whether it would ever happen in the US," says Michael Misasi, an analyst with the Mercator Advisory Group. "All of the data breaches that have happened have woken people up, and progress has been accelerating this year." The first serious milestone is October 2015. By 2020 the swipe-and-sign magstripe reader will be as hard to find as the credit card impression rollers they supplanted.

The end is nigh for online credit card fraud, too. Systems like Apple Pay and Visa's newly announced Visa Token Service (something Discover, Bank of America, Citibank and American Express offered several years earlier) accomplish the same security goals as EMV, but also work online. They replace the static credit card number with a temporary token that changes every time.

http://www.wired.com/2014/09/emv/

Finally, the modern age (Score: 3, Funny)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-09-27 20:23 (#2SZH)

I traveled extensively in Europe this year and bumped into a lot of ATMs where my non-chipped American credit card was totally worthless. About time the Americans joined the modern world. As for the golden age of credit card fraud coming to an end, I'm not so sure. They can't make a carbon copy of my credit card at the restaurant anymore, but now they can camp onto my wireless, hack my router, decrypt my HTTPS connection, steal my identity, post revenge porn of me all over 4chan, trash my email, steal my bank password, and transfer my bank balance to an undisclosed location in the Cayman Islands. While they're at it they can see if I reused passwords, hack my server, and use my Yahoo account to tell all my friends I got kidnapped in Greece and will they please wire some money to that account I never mentioned in the Cayman Islands?

I kind of feel like we're out of the frying pan and into the fire.
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