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You've Got to Act the Part
Courthouse News Service And, disturbingly, the court pointed out that pretty much any country could have done this with a program called FinSpy, which is “sold exclusively to government agencies.” There's no explanation of this statement, so I'm assuming the court got this … |
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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Unless you are German or collect vintage audio equipment, chances are you have never even heard of the Tefifon. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, since virtually everything has a Wikipedia page.
The Tefifon was a German-developed and manufactured audio playback format that utilized cartridges loaded with an endlessly looped reel of plastic tape (much like the later 4-track and 8-track magnetic audio tape cartridges) with grooves embossed on it, similar to the ones on a phonograph record.
Born in the 1950s, it never really caught on, but it’s a fascinating contraption. For a better sense of the Tefifon and how it works, I recommend this 11-minute video from a blog called Techmoan.
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Instead of doing an April Fool, we’ve gone for some April Fun. We took three recent computer security stories, and turned them into poems!
Naked Security – Sophos