Cybersecurity Expert

Last week Internet Service Provider (ISP) TalkTalk pulled a hacking publicity stunt, which they aimed to demonstrate why they should be absolved of all responsibility for the portion of their customers who illegally file shared pirated material. TalkTalk visited a street in North London, and hacked into poorly secured residential wireless networks. Accessing insecurely configured residential WiFi is old news and is illegal, TalkTalk’s point in doing this was to show that anyone could be using residential wireless access points for file sharing illegal material, again nothing new in that either.   http://blog.itsecurityexpert.co.uk/2008/11/reason-to-secure-your-home-wifi.html However the double standards here, is the prime reason why the majority of home wireless networks in the UK aren’t secured to a sufficient degree in the first place, is because ISPs have been providing their customers with wireless access points (routers) in an insecure fashion for years. As far back a...

If the payment card industry, the card schemes such as Visa and MasterCard, and merchants really desired to dramatically reduce payment card fraud, it can be simply done. Today, by far the biggest problem with payment card security (credit and debit cards), is the little black magnetic stripe on the back. This magnetic stripe holds the full card details unprotected. This information is referred to as “track 2 data” within the payment card industry. The problem is this magnetic stripe track 2 data can be easily read with a "cheap to buy" magnetic stripe reader (see picture above), allowing fraudsters to “skim” card details quickly in a variety of ways, for instance placing covert magnetic stripe readers on ATMs (see picture below). Track 2 data is also held in plain text on some payment devices and payment processing applications which store this information. Once track 2 data falls into the hands of card fraudsters, they simply create clone cards by replicating the ma...