Ohio-based company Diebold recently launched what it claims to be “the world’s most secure anti-skimming card reader” called ActiveEdge.
The product works by shifting a card’s insertion angle by 90 degrees, which helps it “thwart devices installed on ATMs to steal the information on a card strip and PIN.”
Diebold Executive VP and Chief Innovation Officer Frank Natoli Jr. said that normally, what enables skimmers to work is when cardholders insert their cards in the same direction of a magnetic stripe reader.
The average cost per skim to an FI, according to Diebold, is $50,000, a loss that amounts in the billions worldwide. ActiveEdge serves as one module that “attacks from every vector,” preventing external and internal skimming by long-edge card insertion and encrypting read head, respectively. It also carries out USB sniffing that eliminates the ability for fraudsters to capture and track data, as well as device substitution, where each card reader has a specific terminal to prevent fraud device installation.
The way in which ActiveEdge defends against other ATM threats is with its automatic gate-locking functionality that counteracts card and currency trapping and fishing, according to Diebold.
But as skimming devices are easy to get ahold of, Diebold won’t always be there to fix the problem. Therefore, consumers need to beware.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
According to Sri Sridharan, managing director of the Center for Cybersecurity at the University of South Florida, “What we need to do is to use technology in smart way, educating the consumers to beware of what they would be doing to protect themselves.”
