Is Your Smart Card Safe?
Is Your Smart Card Vulnerable to Skimming?
Like every new technology that comes along with good intentions to keep us and our information safer. There are legions of people out there willing to show us that it isn’t always safe. Really though, what is 100% safe? Nothing! We just have to have an acceptable level of security and, for all intents and purposes.
RFID chips in our smart cards are reasonably secure. Yet, they can still be surreptitiously read, decoded, and used in crimes against you!
You may have seen videos of people using card readers bought online to brush up against a purse or wallet, or from a safe distance, thus harvesting the information from the RFID chip inside. The person then takes that harvested information and decrypts information to literally make copies of your bank debit or credit cards. At which point the Rolex shopping spree begins and you get stuck with the tab. This is RFID card skimming at work.
RFID Card Skimming
RFID Skimming is a form of digital theft, which enables information from RFID based smart cards to be read and duplicated.
It can be used as a form of wireless identity theft or credit card theft among other forms of information theft. Typically it works by illegitimate reading of RFID microchips at a distance using a cheap RFID reader device, which downloads the card information. From there, it can be written to a new blank card, which then operates in the same manner as the original legitimate card. Because the data is identical on both cards, and the information is only copied, it makes no difference if the original data is encrypted or not.
RFID skimming has been demonstrated as far back as 2008 to be a personal security risk and as recently as 2014. However levels of theft are difficult to determine, as victims typically do not know how their card data was compromised!
While there are currently over 100 million RFID-enhanced credit and debit cards and passports, it is important to insure the safety of your personal information and financial resources. You have to be proactive in protecting yourself.
In our next article we will discuss how users of biometric passports and smart cards can protect themselves against the many potential threats to RFID devices.
Upcoming Article:
So look out for our next article in this series – “How can I Shield my RFID Devices?” You will find it informative and fascinating reading. Click HERE to read this article.
Protect your Smartcards from skimming with an RFID Blocking product from IGOGEER.
Image: RFID-1