Point-of-Sale 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 abstract describes an evaluation spanning five major US banks; the experiments with expired and replaced physical cards cover three of them, and of those three, one approved th...