John Brandon on NFC spoofing:
Spoofing an NFC transaction involves creating a dummy reader—say, another smart card or a smartphone—that sniffs out a close-by signal and steals the data during a transaction.
This would be an issue if the device being sniffed held your credit card number. This is a big lesson learned by Apple and a reason why Apple Pay is much more secure than other wallet mechanisms.
Still, even if a hacker could snag your transaction data as it passes from your iPhone to the terminal, they’d get a single-use token with nothing to identify you by name. Connecting that to the credit cards stored securely by Apple might not be impossible, but the experts we spoke to agree that it’s a lot harder than just stealing some credit card numbers.
Interesting read.
“Connecting that to the credit cards stored securely by Apple might not be impossible”
Well, considering the fact that Apple Pay does not store any credit card information, I’d think that’d be pretty impossible to make the connection. In fact, the only person who has the credit card information is the banks. Even the Merchant doesn’t get the credit card information.
It’s also not a single-use token, and only your phone can generate the correct security code to use with it, but why let facts get in the way of some good FUD?
At least they’re trying to get it right, as opposed to the Chicken Littles, the Luddites, and the Snowdenheads trying to claim Apple is taking everything you have, including your DNA. (Yes, “Hairgate” saw a guy put out a video claiming it was taking your hair to get your DNA and pass that on to Apple and then the NSA.)
whats a snowdenhead? sounds to me like youre trying to link snowden to something he’s not connected to.
I’ve seen a lot of messages and articles around from people who think Snowden is the be-all-end-all of whistleblowing and NSA/Corporate collusion saying anything Apple, Google and the rest of these companies do is beyond the pale. While a certain level of healthy skepticism and preparation is prudent, the amount of paranoia out there, fueled by Snowden’s release of things we already knew for about a decade anyway, is ridiculous.
This article is what tends to happen to journalism whenever you fire all your journalists. You soon start to become irrelevant.