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Beware The Razored Fake Payment Card

Written by Evan Schuman
April 1st, 2008
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A new type of payment card forger is making the rounds, this time armed with a razor blade and very little money.

After the thief has been able to guess at random numbers and find a viable payment card, the culprit razors off the last few digits from a real payment card and KrazyGlues the guessed at numbers onto the card. He/she then scratches the magstripe to force the cashier to manually enter in the digits, according to this nicely-done story from the Oregonian newspaper.


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Kill All The Passwords

This article does mention, but does not give enough attention to, the fact that the attacks discussed are only feasible when the encrypted password file can be copied and subjected to an offline attack. The trick is to have authentication performed on a separate, much more strongly secured host - such as an Active Directory Domain Controller, or a Kerberos server, or a NIS+ server, or even using something as banal as an LDAP-over-SSL authentication dialog. In these environments, the odds of the "password file" being stolen and subjected to an offline attack go to near zero, and only online attacks may be carried out by the attacker. With sensible exponential backoff between failed password attempts, lockout after a modest number of failed attempts on a single account, and pattern detection, that minimum 7 character password is quite secure enough. Passwords aren't dead yet for security purposes, and they will be with us for a very long while to come for practical purposes. The trick is to employ them correctly. Read more...
The possibilities you describe are years away from being implemented at best, so for the moment passwords are an ugly reality. Luckily, password managers can easily manage hundreds of passwords of any length. The only thing a user needs to remember is the master password. It seems like an easier task to educate users on how to use password managers rather than implement complex security technology on a global basis. Read more...