Bloomberg News recently reported that the number of hacked US credit cards offered for sale to other criminals on the Dark Web jumped by about two-thirds in the first half of 2018. The data came from IntSights, a New York-based cybersecurity research firm.
More than 4,000 credit cards per bank were on sale in the first half, up from about 2,400 in the second half of 2017, IntSights said, adding its researchers analyzed data from the “top 50” banks and financial firms in the US and Europe for its report on the Dark Web, where anonymous browsing allows illegal activity to flourish.
It’s interesting to note that the credit-card hacking surge happened despite the EMV rollout for credit and debit cards that has been progressing steadily the past few years all over the world.
EMV—which stands for Europay, Mastercard and Visa, the original card networks that developed the technology and payment scheme—is supposed to make it more difficult for criminals to counterfeit cards, as these would be equipped with chips that authenticate transactions.
Unlike the traditional magnetic-stripe cards that contain unchanging or static data, which can easily be stolen through skimming and counterfeiting, EMV cards generate a unique code for every transaction, one that cannot be used again. If a hacker steals your debit or credit-card information on one specific point of sale, typical card duplication would not work, because the stolen transaction number created in that instance would not be usable again.
Migrating to EMV and making it the global standard is meant to protect consumers and reduce the cost of fraud.
“Losses from ATM fraud have surged alarmingly from P175 million in 2012 to more than P600 million in 2016—a 250-percent increase in just four years. Add to this the reported P500 million stolen through fraudulent credit-card transactions in 2016 alone and one starts to get the scary picture. This has to stop,” said House Committee on Banks and Financial Intermediaries Chairman and Eastern Samar Rep. Ben Evardone, who sponsored a bill that seeks to impose harsher penalties for ATM and bank fraud, which recently passed second reading.
The Philippine National Police Anti-Cybercrime Group (PNP-ACG) also noted that there are thousands of other cases of fraudulent transactions online that have not been reported to the police, because banks are only mandated to report fraudulent transactions with amounts involving P20,000 and above.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) has ordered banks to migrate to EMV as early as 2014, following the lead of other countries, with a mandated deadline to fully shift to EMV by June 30, 2018.
The BSP said there are 76 million debit and prepaid cards currently in circulation, in addition to 8.5 million credit cards.
If you still have your old magnetic stripe debit, credit and ATM cards, have them converted to EMV chip cards right away. Help your bank, the BSP and yourself. You probably have received calls, text messages and/or e-mail from your bank urging you to make the shift and have thus far ignored them. (New EMV credit cards can be mailed but ATMs need a personal visit to your bank.) Protect yourself from fraud by availing yourself of the EMV technology.
The shift to EMV is no doubt an important step to prevent personal data theft, but the Bloomberg story also shows it can’t eliminate all types of card fraud.
Hackers don’t stop targeting bank-account data, IntSights’s Itay Kozuch said in the Bloomberg interview. “To get credit-card or bank-account credentials you don’t need to hack the bank, but you just trick the customer into giving up his credentials on a fake site,” he said. “As banks fortify their defenses, hackers go for the weaker link: the customer.”
Cardholders have the responsibility to protect and safeguard the integrity of their transactions. Thus, immediately report lost cards and observe billing discrepancies. The BSP has a primer on protecting yourself from fraudulent transactions that you can download (https://www.bsp.gov.ph/downloads/primers/CCS4.pdf).
Let’s make the No. 1 rule in boxing also the No. 1 rule in personal banking: Protect yourself at all times.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano