The Hindu : Front Page : Stop them from ‘skimming’ your card

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jul 29, 2007
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Front Page

Stop them from ‘skimming’ your card

Special Correspondent

— Photos: Anand Parthasarathy; London Metropolitan Police

Information security expert Dharshan Shanthamurthy, alerts bankers in Bangalore to new fraud techniques — like this device to skim information off a credit card.

Bangalore: You have just made a credit card transaction and the person at the point of sale in the shop or establishment is swiping your card to complete the payment process. In the few seconds that you are preoccupied with signing your ‘charge slip’ or collecting your purchase, the shop assistant has quickly passed your card through a second — extremely small — ‘skimming’ device, which can easily be concealed with one’s fingers. It has read the magnetic stripe of your card and left the skimmer with all the sensitive information stored in digital form: the 6-digit bank identification, the 9-digit card holder’s identity and the single ‘check’ digit ... which together make up your 16-digit card number — as well as the Card Verification Value, the 3 digits that appear on the obverse of the card.

Your card can now be duplicated — down to the last logo by special machines. Even that may not be necessary: while the merchant establishment was on line with the credit card back office to authenticate your card and authorise payment, baddies have been known to intercept the traffic and pick up information that will allow them to pose as the card owner in Net transactions.

These were some of the chilling scenarios worrying bankers, information technologists and payment card professionals at a daylong seminar here on Saturday organised by SISA Information Security, the first Indian security specialist recognised for conducting audits on behalf of the Payment Card-Security Standards Council (PCI-SSC). SISA’s Chief Consultant, Darshan Shanthamurthy, explained that the Data Security Standard, evolved by SSC addressed almost all current security issues and if uniformly implemented by the card industry — that is credit, debit and ATM cards — would drastically reduce the chance of fraud.

The Hindu spoke to security heads of the leading card companies, to find out what lay consumers could do to lessen the chance of their being defrauded.

Harish Natarajan, Bangalore-based, Director, Operations and Systems Support at Visa, advised that credit card transactions on the Web — which many Indians use these days to book air tickets and hotels or make purchases — were just as secure as physical transactions with your card.

Tony Pereira, Singapore-based vice-president for Advanced Payment Solutions with Mastercard Worldwide, said the situation in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia was becoming much better thanks to the industry and government enforcing stricter data security standards.

Experts at the seminar suggested: always watch while your card is swiped. If possible avoid situations where the card is taken away for processing.

If any suspicious action is seen — like swiping your card a second time on another machine — report the establishment to the card hotline immediately and block your card ... remember your bill is settled only at the end of the day.

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