Fraud, like water finds the path of least resistance. As more and more countries migrate to Chip and PIN, more and more criminals migrate to the web, where security is somewhere between lax and non-existant. This article talks about the fact that countries that have initiated Chip and PIN must do so across the board...including ATM's. For the record, HomeATM's PCI 2.0 Certified PIN Entry Device is EMV (Chip and PIN) ready...Chip and PIN cards wasted by Australian banks
Bank delays exposing Aussies to credit card fraud
Marissa Calligeros
July 7, 2009 - 2:05PM
New security-enhanced credit cards fitted with anti-skimming microchips are useless in the fight against credit card fraud because Australia's banks have been too slow to introduce ATMs and EFTPOS machines capable of reading them, experts say.
Former cybercrime consultant to Britain's MI5 security intelligence service Fraser Smith said banks were lulling consumers into a false sense of security with the introduction of chip and PIN enabled credit cards because the technology to make them fully effective - while available - had not been fully rolled out.
Chip and PIN cards are designed to reduce the risk of card skimming and require a "PIN pad" terminal, or a modified swipe-card reader, which accesses the security chip on the card. While several thousand of the new machines are believed to be in circulation already, the Australian Banking Association says it could be up to two years before the majority of ATMs and EFTPOS machines in Australia are upgraded to include the chip readers.
Queensland fraud investigators fear the lag is exposing already vulnerable bank customers even further. "It is a mistake," Mr Smith said of the delay, at a meeting of the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering in Brisbane today. "If you're going to go (with chip and PIN) go the whole way."Chip and PIN technology was introduced across-the-board in the UK in 2006, but Australia, like Canada and the United States, still relies on magnetic strip technology, whereby credit cards are swiped through ATM and EFTPOS machines.
Queensland Detective Superintendent Brian Hay of the Fraud and Corporate Crime Group said Australians were becoming increasingly vulnerable to international banking scams as a result.
"Whilst we still rely upon magnetic strip data and the rest of the world migrates to chip and PIN, it's going to become a bigger problem here," he said.
"It's like fish in a pond... as that pond dries up those fish are going to become more concentrated. "In Australia we are going to have a higher concentration of cyber-based criminals around the world migrating to Australia to exploit our vulnerabilities. "We will not be fully secure until all our point of sale terminals are chip compliant."
Continue Reading at the Brisbane Times
