Slashdot Mirror
Wireless Registers May Expose Your Credit Card
flynt writes: "Found this article about people sitting in Best Buy parking lots with wireless sniffers and intercepting credit card numbers that the wireless cash registers inside the store are beaming about. Gives more credence to the idea of one time use credit card numbers. Now you don't even have to be online to have your number stolen."
It's nice technology, and has some pretty good uses, but overall people don't pay enough attention to security. And that's just plain dangerous.
:-)
We've had a seminar recently at our university with a security expert talking about cellular phones. There's a lot of encryption going on in these devices, but it's apparently not very solid. In one standard made by the big boys of the industry, an example encryption method was presented that wasn't fully secure. The little ones didn't have the knowledge to implement their own, so they adopted the example. Only to pay a lot of cash to some experts afterwards to get it out again.
Now, them paying a lot of cash is not the dangerous part, but the lack of security is. It's only a matter of time before the first big virus strike in bluetooth-gsm-cash register-insert your favourite device here.
Come to think of it, that would be rather cool
This is WORST Buy we're talking about, remember?
The same guys who want to foist copy protected CDs as a standard on their customers? The ones who tried to arrest a customer for trying to pick up a video card that he bought on sale online? The ones with the ultra-crappy customer service?
If you're still shopping at Best Buy, this fiasco with the wireless registers should be enough to make you go somewhere else.
Is anybody actually surprised that nobody at Best Buy knows how to configure an encrypted wireless network?
Best Buy sends the credit card info cleartext over 802.11....... hmmmm maybe they really truly are best buy then! They went out and found the cheapest Wireless Point of Sale system.. to them it was the BEST BUY :)
but it's not really stealing if i ipurchase things with someone else's card because i would not have bought anything if i did not have someone else's credit card number.
oh wait... I have been reading slashdot for too long!
"Now you don't even have to be online to have your number stolen."
right, before the internet, credit card numbers couldn't be stolen. I also understand that before the internet, no music was ever pirated.
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you're all figments of my deranged imagination
Gives more credence to the idea of one time use credit card numbers
Sounds like a great idea, one-transaction cards, with a unique number on each of them, all tied to one account.
But plastic swipe cards are too expensive to use once and throw away--make them out of paper, better for the environment.
While you're at it, you could eliminate the need for the seperate credit card reciept by putting the amount and signature on the (paper) card, and handing it to the retailer... you could even that funny non-carbon carbon paper if you wanted a reciept for yourself.
Print them up in a handy-little tear off pack, maybe throw in a balance sheet so you can keep track of your expenses (if you're so inclined).
If you let little old ladies get ones with puppies or kittens on them, this radical idea of yours might just be a success!
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Benjamin Coates