skimming

Hackers steal customer data from Barnes & Noble keypads

Hackers broke into keypads at more than 60 Barnes & Noble bookstores and made off with the credit card information for customers who shopped at the stores as recently as last month.

The company discovered the breach on September 14 but kept it quiet while the FBI attempted to track the hackers. Hackers broke into the point-of-sale terminals at 63 stores across the country, including locations in New York City, San Diego, Miami, and Chicago.

Since discovering the breach, the company has uninstalled all 7,000 point-of-sale terminals from its hundreds of stores for examination. Although only one terminal in … Read more

The 404 909: Where we get evicted out of Starbucks (podcast)

Walk into any Starbucks and you'll see the usual Internet leeches sipping on $5 cups of coffee, but not all of them are shopping for designer handbags on eBay or checking the scores from last night's game--sometimes you'll see a student working on homework because his or her family can't afford broadband Internet access at home.

For these individuals, Comcast is offering discounted monthly Internet plans for $9.95 a month with its new Internet Essentials Program. Participating families of three must quality for the national free lunch program and make less than $24,000 a year, which also allows access to discounted computers from Microsoft, Dell, and Acer for just $159.

On today's episode of The 404 Podcast, we'll also tell you about a first-person shooter game coming out of Australia that does away with firearms and instead puts you in the eyes of a photojournalist embedded in a war zone.

The game is called Warco, which stands for "war correspondent," and the object of the game is to film conflicts and create a story from start to finish alongside other journalists covering the same story.

It's up to you to choose which side should be framed as evil and good since there's no obvious protagonist, but we're doubtful that mainstream gamers are willing to forego a gun for a camera, especially since part of the game involves editing the footage you shot earlier.

Next, we'll chat about a gang that used 3D printers to produce their own ATM skimmers. For those unaware, skimmers consist of a plastic card acceptance slot that fits over the ATM machine and can read the data stored on any card's magnetic stripe, while a pinhole camera next to the ATM key pad records the associating code.

Making clever use of a 3D printer in action, a group of four men from South Texas are currently serving time in Houston for stealing over $400,000 between August 2009 and June of this year. It's unclear whether the men built their own 3D printer or bought one online, but KrebsonSecurity.com speculates that a high end device costing anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 would do the job. Don't get any ideas.

We've got a handful of voice mails to play after the break, and Mickey Mouse pays us another visit, so if you want to be heard on the show, phone us up at 1-866-404-CNET and tell us what's up!

The 404 Digest for Episode 909

Warco: an FPS where you hold a camera instead of a gun. Comcast offers cheap broadband to poor families. Facebook employee leaks music service details on Twitter. Gang used 3D printers for ATM skimmers.

Episode 909 Subscribe in iTunes (audio) | Subscribe in iTunes (video) | Subscribe in RSS Audio | Subscribe in RSS Video… Read more

Researchers find avenues for fraud in Square

LAS VEGAS--Researchers at the Black Hat security conference today revealed two ways the Square payment system, which turns any iPhone, iPad or Android into a point-of-sale credit card processor, could be used for fraud.

Adam Laurie and Zac Franken, directors of Aperture Labs, discovered that they can transfer money from a stolen card into their bank account associated with Square without having to swipe a card through the Square dongle card reader. To do this, they used code written by Laurie that lets them feed magnetic stripe data from a stolen card into a microphone and convert it into a … Read more

High-tech bank robbers phone it in

Your ordinary bank robber can now steal hundreds of account numbers from ATMs without so much as lifting a finger. Instead, he skims.

Skimming is the physical use of secondary readers to capture the magnetic tracks on the backs of credit and debit cards. On ATMs, skimmers and secondary keypads are used to capture account numbers and PINs. Often, the ATM transaction goes through, and the customer doesn't realize that the account has been compromised until later.

Two risks these high-tech criminals face are being caught fitting a faux cover over an ordinary ATM card slot and keypad, then … Read more

The myth of the Ninja Hacker

Washington D.C. -- On Wednesday, in a talk at Black Hat D.C. 2008, two researchers set out to see whether phishing sites were created by the "Einsteinian, ninja hackers that the media makes them out to be."

In a talk titled "Bad Sushi: Beating Phishers at their own game," Nitesh Dhanjani and Billy Rios found not a sophisticated gang of elite coders, but hundreds of bad coders all copying one another, and often stealing from each other.

Dhanjani and Rios expressed disapproval of antiphishing products that use black lists to block known phishing sites. … Read more

Citibank limits ATM withdrawals in New York City

In response to a series of ATM robberies over the holidays, Citibank has drastically reduced the daily amounts its customers may withdrawal from ATMs. In some cases, customers of Citibank could once withdrawal as much as $2000 per day, depending upon the account. The new limits are around $500 per day for most customers.

Citibank attributes the action to reports of "skimming," the process of copying someone's ATM card and passcode or PIN, over the holidays. In one scenario, criminals may have mounted a false ATM reader in front of the genuine reader and later retrieved the … Read more