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Ask Slashdot: How Do You Keep Your Credit Card Secure?
It's easy to pontificate about the best security practices -- but the real test is what we do with our own money. Long-time Slashdot reader Keybounce writes:
So, like most of you, I recently got a new credit card with a chip in it. I was not worried about that -- I know the chips are harder to copy and counterfeit. But I recently discovered that the card is also a radio card -- swiping it near the screen caused an message to show up on the reader. In this case, it told me to use the chip reader instead, but this means it has an active radio signal, and could be "hacked" -- stolen by someone with the right device.
How can I prevent this? Is there anything I can do that will disable the radio signal and still leave the chip functioning?
At least 200 million RFID credit cards were in circulation by 2012, even though their signals could be easily intercepted, prompting the introduction of RFID-blocking wallets and sleeves. But what's the alternative? A recent article in Quartz argued that America's transition to chip cards has been an utter disaster (since the banks dispensed with PIN numbers altogether and now validate with only an electronic signature). Is the answer to just use a mobile wallet like Apple Pay or Android Pay -- or to always pay with cash?
So leave your own answer in the the comments. How are you keeping your own credit card secure?
How can I prevent this? Is there anything I can do that will disable the radio signal and still leave the chip functioning?
At least 200 million RFID credit cards were in circulation by 2012, even though their signals could be easily intercepted, prompting the introduction of RFID-blocking wallets and sleeves. But what's the alternative? A recent article in Quartz argued that America's transition to chip cards has been an utter disaster (since the banks dispensed with PIN numbers altogether and now validate with only an electronic signature). Is the answer to just use a mobile wallet like Apple Pay or Android Pay -- or to always pay with cash?
So leave your own answer in the the comments. How are you keeping your own credit card secure?
It doesn't include the CVV2 that will be requested even by very low risk online retailers. You might be thinking, "But this field right here is labelled CVV" and it is, but there are like four CVVs for a modern card, and that's the wrong one. The one you need online is CVV2, which is the one written on the back of the card but not stored on the card itself.
This happened because cards _used_ to have just one CVV, baked into the magstripe, so you could tell you had a "real" magstripe read, not one based on just reading the digits off the card, but if people got the CVV elsewhere they'd fake that out. So the "fix" was to have a different value for CVV in each place, and check you got the right one. So there's a CVV for EMV chip transactions, a CVV for the magstripe and one written on the card for online.