ESET, a global pioneer in proactive protection for 25-years, warned credit and debit card users on card fraud by providing top tips for defending user’s accounts and identity. ESET reports that cyber criminals are stealing credit/debit card data and other personal information from big retail shops.
Top Tips for Defending Accounts and Identity:
- Check your account for suspicious activity: Check your account statement regularly, especially in the year end as the cyber criminals likely to hang on to data and use it after attention has died off.
- Ask for a replacement debit/credit card: If you are not continuously tracking your card or lost your card (or not lost sometimes), ask for immediate replacement. Make sure, if you have any auto-pay accounts that reference this account number, you will need to update that information when the replacement card is activated
- Change your debit PIN: If you are using debit card, it will be always better to change PIN often. Criminals are actively working to crack the encryption used to protect this information, and many people use weak PINs that are easy to guess.
- Check your credit report: Now-a-days, the thieves will have enough information on some shoppers to carry out identity theft(new accounts in your name), which can be much worse than dealing with fraudulent charges on a card. One should regularly monitor the credit report so that he can spot and then report any fraudulent account activity.
- Change your online shopping passwords: As a precaution, it is a good idea to change your passwords, making sure they are hard-to-guess and unique to each account.
- Beware of scams: Criminals may now have access to more information about customers than just card data. So they are now more likely to use this data to send scam or phishing emails. Be sure not to click on links in emails purporting to come from businesses angle.
- Tax Identity Theft Awareness: The data you need to steal to create fake credit and debit cards does not include Social Security or Tax ID numbers. But if those numbers are stolen, they can be used for tax identity theft, which is a huge problem in America right now
How could this happen?
Possibilities may be that the encryption may not have been implemented correctly. Another is that the data may not encrypted throughout the transaction process. If the data is temporarily decrypted in random access memory (RAM) by point-of-sale (POS) machines, it can be read and processed. Thieves may have stolen the data from RAM, using a technique called RAM scraping, which has already been used in some malware. |
