Quote:
Originally Posted by QuantumIguana
We really have to get out of the stone age. There are a lot more secure means of payment that could be used. Smart cards that where there is mutual authentication between the card and the system on the other end before any transaction took place. With that, just knowing your card number wouldn't allow someone to rip you off.
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Smart cards are better, but there isn't a system out there that hasn't been cracked under real world conditions.
Current standards in the US are going away, though. There's a new system (using smart cards) that will be essentially mandatory within the next few years that will involve everything being encrypted on the card, so that the merchant never has access to all the information needed for the transaction. The will eliminate one major point of failure (and would have prevented this breach), but instead the criminals will concentrate on breaking in to bank computers (where they can steal millions of cards' worth of info at once) and malware for smart phones (which will be able to serve as smart cards under the new system) to steal them one at a time in an automated system.