Tag Archive for: number

This gizmo knows your Amex card number before you’ve received it

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A device built by legendary hacker Samy Kamkar calls into question the security of payment cards as the U.S. continues to grapples with card fraud.

Kamkar’s device, nicknamed MagSpoof, is about the size of a U.S. quarter, and it’s safe to say it would be a fraudster’s dream.

MagSpoof can predict what a new American Express card number will be based on a canceled card’s number. The new expiration date can also be predicted based on when the replacement card was requested.

It can also trick point-of-sale readers into accepting payment from cards that are supposed to have a microchip with advanced cryptographic capabilities designed to deter fraud, a system known as chip-and-PIN, but do not.

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Network World Security

How tech led to the death of France’s public enemy number 1

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When one of the terrorists involved in the Paris shootings dropped his smartphone in a trashcan outside the Bataclan concert venue on Friday night, he wasn’t worried about encrypting his text messages or stored documents. Why would he be? With a bomb strapped to his waist, he knew he was about to die.

But that telephone, and wiretaps on another, led police to announce Thursday that the suspected organizer of the shootings and a string of other attacks, Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, was dead.

The phone discarded by one of the terrorists contained an SMS sent to an unidentified recipient at 9.42 p.m. local time, moments before the shooting there began: “On est parti on commence” (“We’re going in”), public prosecutor François Molins told a news conference Wednesday evening.

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Network World Security

Hackers Stole the Biggest Number of Apple Accounts Ever with iOS Malware

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Think twice before jailbreaking your iPhone. A recent rash of malware has helped hackers steal over 250,000 Apple accounts, the largest theft of its kind. The malware only affects jailbroken devices, but if you get pwned, hackers can not only peek your …
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US warns ‘significant number’ of major businesses hit by Backoff malware

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Over a thousand major enterprise networks and small and medium businesses in the U.S. have been compromised by a recently discovered malware package called “Backoff” and are probably unaware of it, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a cybersecurity alert on Friday.

Backoff first appeared in October 2013 and is capable of scraping the memory contents of point of sales systems—industry speak for cash registers and other terminals used at store checkouts—for data swiped from credit cards, from monitoring the keyboard and logging keystrokes, from communicating with a remote server.

“Over the past year, the Secret Service has responded to network intrusions at numerous businesses throughout the United States that have been impacted by the “Backoff” malware,” the alert said. “Seven PoS system providers/vendors have confirmed that they have had multiple clients affected.”

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Network World Security