"RFID credit cards easily hacked with $8 reader by Nilay Patel, posted Mar 19th 2008 at 6:33PM
The RFID hacks keep coming fast and furious -- hot the heels of that Mifare / Oyster Card exploit, the crew at BoingBoing TV has posted up a little demo of how easy cracking the RFID encryption on an American Express card can be. All it takes is an $8 dollar reader easily available on eBay, some software, and the courage to walk around with a laptop waving plastic boxes at people's butt pockets, but developer Pablos Holman says he's hoping to develop a newer version that will allow him to be a little more discreet. The root of the problem is apparently the fact that the system uses local decryption rather than sending card info to a secure data center, but either way we've been worried about this for a long time -- we're sticking to loose change and the barter system from now on." Video and all.
AMEX were one of the first to chip cards. According to Wikipedia once they developed ExpressPay they then used the same RFID technology in there BLUE smart cards... and of course now they and others have come unstuck because of recent hacking of this platform. So a BIG opening for Keycorp here!
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