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Cyber Risks · Krebs on Security

Meet Bluetana, the Scourge of Pump Skimmers

Summary: Researchers at UC San Diego and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working with the U.S. Secret Service, built a mobile app called Bluetana that scans for Bluetooth-based card skimmers hidden in gas pumps; 44 volunteers used it over a year at 1,185 stations across six states and detected 64 skimmers in four states, all later collected by law enforcement, including two missed in manual inspections six months earlier. The study estimates per-day revenue from a single skimmer at $4,253 on the low end and $63,638 on the high end, against roughly $25 to produce the device, and notes a stolen debit card's PIN can raise its black market value five-fold.

Bottom line: A $25 device pulling in thousands of dollars a day explains why pump skimming persists, and the two skimmers that survived manual inspection six months earlier show that the physical checks stations rely on can miss what a Bluetooth scan finds.

Read the original at Krebs on Security ↗

Topics
Data Breaches
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