Contributor

Airport kiosks may be stealing your credit card info

Opinion
Jul 28, 20081 min

I never feel comfortable using a credit card as identification.  Ever since check-in kiosks at the airport  started to do that I have been uncomfortable with swiping my credit card.  I know they are just looking at my name which is evidently encoded on the mag stripe, but that motion is the same motion I use at an ATM to pull money from my account.  What’s to stop the airline, kiosk manufacturer, or a hacker from grabbing my credit card number and CCV info?

Evidently there is some suspicion that that is exactly what is going on at kiosks in Toronto.  One airline, WestJet, as a precautionary measure has shut off the credit card scanning function of their kiosks at 28 airports.

My advice: don’t use credit cards as ID.  

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.

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