Identity thieves capture “holy grail” of PINs
Thursday, August 14th, 2008If you’ve been following the news from the Department of Justice about the 11 people charged in an international identity theft ring, you may be feeling a little sick to your stomach about now. Well, take a Tums, because the news only gets worse.
It looks like they’ve found away to use your super-secret PIN.
When you swipe your debit card at the cash register and enter your personal identification number, the data is encrypted into a long string of text that looks like meaningless gobbledygook called a PIN block. If, however, identity thieves gained access to the encryption key that translates that gobbledygook into a PIN again, they would have gained what’s being called “the holy grail” of card theft.
It seems these guys have done just that, and profited from it over a five-year period.
