(RT) The attack on millions of customers’ credit cards at retailer Target has exposed the outdated security tools used in banking. And while the US is scheduled to switch to more modern card protection in 2015, not all parties are interested in modernization.
“We are using 20th century cards against 21st century hackers. The thieves have moved on but the cards have not,” Mallory Duncan, general counsel at the National Retail Federation told AP.
Target has refused to specify the means by which fraudsters managed to steal the data of up to 40 million customers between November 27 and December 15. But almost all experts, citing industry sources and existing fraud cases, say most likely the data was siphoned with special devices attached to payment terminals, which scanned the magnetic strips on the back of the card.
This type of hacking would not have been possible had Target used Chip and PIN cards, officially known as EMV, which encrypt the data, making it much harder to intercept at the point of use. In contrast the technology on magnetic stripes is similar to that of cassette tapes, which became obsolete more than a decade ago; they can also be easily reproduced.
More than 90 percent of all cards in the EU and four out of five in Canada use EMV. In total there are 1.6 billion of them around the world. Contrastingly, about 1 percent of US cards have the technology, and even those are not secure, as only one in ten American payment terminals can actually process information from the chip.
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