PIN Scandal 'Worst Hack Ever'

QuietLagoon writes "The evolving Citibank PIN scandal is getting worse with each passing day. Gregg Keizer of TechWeb News writes: 'The unfolding debit card scam that rocked Citibank this week is far from over, an analyst said Thursday as she called this first-time-ever mass theft of PINs 'the worst consumer scam to date.' ... The problem...is that retailers improperly store PIN numbers after they've been entered, rather than erase them at the PIN-entering pad. Worse, the keys to decrypt the PIN blocks are often stored on the same network as the PINs themselves, making a single successful hack a potential goldmine for criminals: they get the PIN data and the key to read it.'"

Comments

"hardly anyone carries cash"?

[Anonymous Coward]

People like you are the problem. Shred your fucking debit card and start carrying cash! It's a lot safer--sure, if I get mugged I might lose $200 (which has never happened in over 10 years of carrying significant amounts of cash around, by the way). But at least I don't have to worry about some scammer getting my debit card info and draining my whole fucking account.

As a bonus, they don't collect any useful data about my purchasing habits either since they have nothing to correlate them with.