Identity Theft Starting At Gas Stations?
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Jeremy Kirk at ComputerWorld reports that identity theft and data security breaches are starting at gas stations.
In the hands of sophisticated hackers and counterfeiters, the data collected from the magnetic stripe is enough to create a replica card. “It’s almost more dangerous to go to the gas station than it is online,” Litan said at Gartner’s Identity and Access Management Summit in London on Monday. “The data is just sitting there. No one even thought about what data is on a POS controller.”
Retailers’ network configurations are partly to blame. Many are using the Internet to transmit data in place of dial-up networks, and many have incorporated wireless access points into their networks using WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), Litan said, which is not considered a strong form of encryption.
Since WEP is so easily cracked, often within just seconds, everything can be captured by attackers and used to make credit cards and steal the identities of unsuspecting customers that were just filling up their vehicles.
Oh boy. Got to start paying cash for gas.
[Data breaches start at the gas station, analyst says]
[tags]identity theft, credit card fraud, fraud[/tags]
One Comment
J. Kim
July 4th, 2007
at 1:32am
This actually happened to me at a gas station outside of LA, just off Route 5. I paid for my gas using my ATM debit card (which I rarely use). Two days later I got a call from my bank that their computer had detected fraud. Somebody had made a copy of my ATM debit card — apparently from the gas station because it’s the only place I used it, and had withdrawn $1200 from my account. Luckily the bank refunded my money no questions asked. I called the cops in the town where the crime happened, and they said that there was nothing that they could do.