Did you know there is still a good reason to physically destroy your expired credit card? Scientific research found that the expiration date used by payment terminals on some contactless cards was not effectively protected against tampering.
University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza tested contactless cards across Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express, using multiple terminals and merchants, and cards from five major US banks.
They found that a payment terminal could be tricked into seeing a future expiry date. Basically, they were able to modify the expiration date sent to the terminal to a future date. This allowed them to revive expired Visa contactless credit cards for real in-store purchases. Hence the name “Zombie Card.”
Read more…
Source: MalwareBytes Labs
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- CISA, NSA, FBI warn Chinese AI firms of industrial‑scale knowledge distillation
September 9, 2026
Chinese AI companies’ core development strategy is to steal proprietary functionalities and capabilities from their US counterparts, law enforcement agencies have warned. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published a new security advisory, drafted jointly with the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), warning American AI companies about an ongoing “aggressive, malicious, ...
- Microsoft fixes record 964 flaws, including 2 exploited zero-days
September 9, 2026
Microsoft’s September 2026 Patch Tuesday addresses 964 CVEs, including 104 rated Critical and 860 rated Important, making it the company’s largest Patch Tuesday release on record. Microsoft lists 974 CVEs in its full September security release. However, 10 of those affect cloud services or involve fixes that Microsoft applies itself, leaving 964 vulnerabilities that customers need to patch. The ...
- MikroTik router flaws allow takeover without a password
September 8, 2026
CERT Polska warns that attackers are actively exploiting a chain of critical MikroTik RouterOS flaws to seize control of routers exposed to the internet. Although the warning comes from Poland’s national cybersecurity response team, MikroTik routers are sold worldwide, including in the US. The vulnerabilities can affect users anywhere if their router is running a vulnerable version ...
- Two major security flaws are affecting more than six million WordPress websites
September 7, 2026
More than six million WordPress users are at risk of website takeover, researchers have claimed after discovering two major vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild. Security researchers Wordfence disclosed finding two flaws, one in Elementor Pro, and one in Super Forms – two popular WordPress plugins. Elementor Pro is a commercial plugin that allows users to build websites using ...
- More than 1 million users affected in Mathspace data breach across Australia and New Zealand
September 7, 2026
More than a million people, including students, school staff, and parents, have been affected following a data breach at Mathspace, according to the learning provider. The company said, in a blog post, “unauthorised parties had accessed an internal reporting system used by Mathspace” and the exposed information included names and email addresses. It said the attackers accessed ...
- G7 tells businesses to get ready for quantum cybersecurity threats
September 7, 2026
The G7, a collection of some of the world’s most powerful economies, is urging organizations to adopt quantum-resistant encryption as soon as possible and minimize the risk of losing sensitive data to technologically advanced threat actors. Virtually every industry in the world today relies on encryption (the process of converting readable data into scrambled, unreadable data ...