Anticipating the Wireless Identity Theft by Knowing It

Wireless Identity Theft, narmadi.com. Technology has grown so far, especially in the current modern era. This growth is developed massively, touches every aspect of human life, including for the security. Talking about security, this aspect is terribly needed, especially in the monetary system to secure the assets.

Several examples can be seen in many real cases such as high technology safe, protected transaction system, the use of several kinds of monetary card, and others. But, as the security system is increased by the use of modern technology, the theft action is also increased, by employing modernity too. That’s why we often here the term Wireless Identity Theft.

What is Wireless Identity Theft

Wireless Identity Theft

Wireless Identity Theft is the new way used by theft to steal something, mostly the essential data. Some people call it contactless identity theft since to do the stealing action, the theft doesn’t need to do direct contact with the victim.

This is an action of stealing someone’s personal data information by using wireless mechanics. This illegal action usually targets the essential information stored in the RF-enabled cards such as credit card, ID card, debit card, passport, and others. These are the card that contains RF chip in it, and this chip becomes the target of the theft.

Read more about RFID in: Understanding RFID Reader

Wireless Identity Theft will target the information contain in this chip. They will use certain Radio Frequency to trigger the chip for responding back with slight altered signal. This signal will be encoded and translated into many kinds of important information such as phone number, address, name, PIN number, security numbers, and any other kinds of it.

This is of course so threatening for some card holder since this stealing action can be done wirelessly. A wireless identity theft could just access the personal information of someone from a few feet away.

Wireless Identity Theft Target

Anticipating the Wireless Identity Theft by Knowing It.

Talking about target, there are many kinds of target that is targeted by Wireless Identity Theft depends. For some public figure for example, their personal information such as name, address, phone number, and others are really matters. And they use the best way to protect their information from the theft. But, from the usual cases, what becomes the main target is mostly something related to money, such as ATM, Debet, and mostly, credit cards.

In 2013, the use of credit card has been accelerated since 2013. Banking Corporation around the world even expected that the credit card product can be distributed and used by approximately 70 million people globally.

Most of these cards are chip based card for a better security system than the magnetic striped credit card that is considered more vulnerable. Even so, there are still any gaps for Wireless Identity Theft to do their action.

Chip based card is divided into two kinds. The first chip-based card needs to touch the reader physically to transfer the data. Besides, in reading the data, you also need to enter PIN number.

This is relatively safe since there is no possibility for wireless data transferring. And for the second one, the card contains RFID chip which can send the data through the air, or in other words, wirelessly. This is the kind of cip that mostly used in credit card, Visa, Mastercard, and others.

This card is relatively risky even when the company claims that issued this card are safe by using several unique encryption. This is proven by the success of University of Massachusetts that has been successful building the skimming scanners. This scanner is able to scan the information inside RFID card wirelessly, without owner permission.

Read also: RFID technology applications

How to Overcome Wireless Identity Theft

However, there is always a way in overcoming Wireless Identity Theft. In the traditional way, metal can block the interference signal from the outside. So, covering your card using Aluminum foil can be the alternative ways to protect your RFID chip-based card.

Further, for the more sophisticated option, you can use RFID blocking wallet. Finally, we hope that this article can be informative as a reference. And by reading this article, we hope you will be able to understand deeper how the RFID-based card works. So, you can anticipate the Wireless Identity Theft action to happen on you.

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