Shimmers and Skimmers: Fraudsters Find Opportunity in EMV Chip Cards

Visa and Mastercard report significant reductions in counterfeit fraud since EMV chips rolled out in the U.S. market, but the benefit may be short-lived as this article states. Moreover, the new buzz-word that identifies the criminal act evolves from “skimming” to “shimming.” Instead of copying the magnetic stripe data, shimming attacks the EMV chip.

The potential risk here is not the chip itself but rather on the issuing bank’s execution of setting up the card security. Banks must trigger encoding functions on the card to be adequately secured. Fraudsters are just as innovative than banks. They look for holes and exploit weaknesses.

Source: PaymentsJournal July 2, 2018