this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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Three days before Thanksgiving, someone was trying to steal peoples food stamps.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

What shitty system even allows this to happen? It's not like the microchip in credit cards that allows for secure transactions is particularly expensive.

Small addendum because I looked it up:

Apparently checks aren't the only ancient aspect of the US banking system. Chip cards have apparently only come around in the past few years, prior they used the insecure magnetic strip cards that can literally just be copied.

[–] CrazyLikeGollum 24 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Also, the chips aren't that much better than the stripe. It's harder to clone the chip and much harder to do en masse, but far from impossible. On top of that, the measure that is supposed to prevent cloning from being viable is almost never actually required, that being the PIN.

It's called "Chip and PIN" for a reason. It's a 2FA system where one of the factors just isn't required and the other can be readily compromised. It's baffling how we have a functioning system for digital payments when seemingly no one is willing to properly implement and then use a secure standard.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Tap to pay is much safer though.

[–] CrazyLikeGollum 1 points 1 week ago

Not if you're using your card. The card can still be cloned with a few seconds of physical access. Also, with a card, there's no PIN verification with tap to pay and no signature requirements. Because of that most countries have transaction size limits for tap to pay. Usually in the $50-$100 USD range. The US, notably has no such limits. So, if someone steals your card they can use it up to your balance/credit limit, or up to the transaction limit your bank sets, typically about $10,000 USD.

Tap to pay using a phone, apple watch, or similar device is more secure because they have actual 2FA and generate unique payment information for each transaction on top of the already existing encryption of the transaction data. Additionally, cloning the underlying payment info would require being able to access the secure enclave on the phone.

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