NFC Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have demonstrated an attack that revives expired Visa contactless credit cards for real in-store purchases by rewriting the expiration date a point-of-sale (POS) terminal reads over near-field communication (NFC), without breaking any of the card's cryptography. The attack, which the researchers named " Zombie Card ," requires physical possession of the expired card or sustained NFC proximity to it, plus a man-in-the-middle (MitM) relay positioned between the card and the terminal. It also requires that the account remain open under the same primary account number (PAN), which is standard practice when an issuer sends a replacement card, and that the issuing bank not independently re-check the expiry during authorization. The paper's preliminary study spans five major US banks and tests general tampering with Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) transactions. Raja Hasnain Anwar, the lead author, told The Hac...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new Android trojan called PhantomCard that abuses near-field communication (NFC) to conduct relay attacks for facilitating fraudulent transactions in attacks targeting banking customers in Brazil. "PhantomCard relays NFC data from a victim's banking card to the fraudster's device," ThreatFabric said in a report. "PhantomCard is based on Chinese-originating NFC relay malware-as-a-service." The Android malware, distributed via fake Google Play web pages mimicking apps for card protection, goes by the name "Proteção Cartões" (package name "com.nfupay.s145" or "com.rc888.baxi.English"). The bogus pages also feature deceptive positive reviews to persuade victims into installing the app. It's currently not known how links to these pages are distributed, but it likely involves smishing or a similar social engineering technique. Once the app is installed and opened, it requests victim...