credit cards – Noise

Social Engineering People’s Credit Card Details

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 11:01:20 +0000

Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information:

Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations.

The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics.

Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security...

Credit Card Fraud That Bypasses 2FA

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 11:29:41 +0000

Someone in the UK is stealing smartphones and credit cards from people who have stored them in gym lockers, and is using the two items in combination to commit fraud:

Phones, of course, can be made inaccessible with the use of passwords and face or fingerprint unlocking. And bank cards can be stopped.

But the thief has a method which circumnavigates those basic safety protocols.

Once they have the phone and the card, they register the card on the relevant bank’s app on their own phone or computer. Since it is the first time that card will have been used on the new device, a one-off security passcode is demanded...

Using Machine Learning to Guess PINs from Video

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 13:07:08 +0000

Researchers trained a machine-learning system on videos of people typing their PINs into ATMs: By using three tries, which is typically the maximum allowed number of attempts before the card is withheld, the researchers reconstructed the correct sequen...

Web Credit Card Skimmer Steals Data from Another Credit Card Skimmer

Bruce Schneier — Tue, 09 Feb 2021 12:01:26 +0000

MalwareBytes is reporting a weird software credit card skimmer. It harvests credit card data stolen by another, different skimmer:

Even though spotting multiple card skimmer scripts on the same online shop is not unheard of, this one stood out due to its highly specialized nature.

“The threat actors devised a version of their script that is aware of sites already injected with a Magento 1 skimmer,” Malwarebytes’ Head of Threat Intelligence Jérôme Segura explains in a report shared in advance with Bleeping Computer.

“That second skimmer will simply harvest credit card details from the already existing fake form injected by the previous attackers.”...

Hiding Malware in Social Media Buttons

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 12:32:09 +0000

Clever tactic:

This new malware was discovered by researchers at Dutch cyber-security company Sansec that focuses on defending e-commerce websites from digital skimming (also known as Magecart) attacks.

The payment skimmer malware pulls its sleight of hand trick with the help of a double payload structure where the source code of the skimmer script that steals customers’ credit cards will be concealed in a social sharing icon loaded as an HTML ‘svg’ element with a ‘path’ element as a container.

The syntax for hiding the skimmer’s source code as a social media button perfectly mimics an ‘svg’ element named using social media platform names (e.g., facebook_full, twitter_full, instagram_full, youtube_full, pinterest_full, and google_full)...

Interesting Attack on the EMV Smartcard Payment Standard

Bruce Schneier — Mon, 14 Sep 2020 11:21:36 +0000

It’s complicated, but it’s basically a man-in-the-middle attack that involves two smartphones. The first phone reads the actual smartcard, and then forwards the required information to a second phone. That second phone actually conducts the transaction on the POS terminal. That second phone is able to convince the POS terminal to conduct the transaction without requiring the normally required PIN.

From a news article:

The researchers were able to demonstrate that it is possible to exploit the vulnerability in practice, although it is a fairly complex process. They first developed an Android app and installed it on two NFC-enabled mobile phones. This allowed the two devices to read data from the credit card chip and exchange information with payment terminals. Incidentally, the researchers did not have to bypass any special security features in the Android operating system to install the app...