We Need To Dump Our Love of Plastic

The CVV2 Number Provides a Fragile Base For Our Finance Infrastructure

And so we see with the BA Hack how easy it can be for someone to grab your credit card details. In fact, every time you give away your CVV number, your card is at risk, and you don’t actually know who may have your card details. The only way that this model still sustains, is that your credit card company will give you the money back if you have not been negligent. But what happens if you stupidly gave a cybercriminal your CVV number by mistake? Are you still covered?

An old world

Our credit cards are a legacy of our past. With the magnetic stripe, we had a hidden magnetic code on the stripe, and a criminal could only gain it by skimming the card. They thus need physical access to the card, but once they had it, it could be used multiple times. And so we scaled our online payments worlds and decided that we would have a “card-not-present” method, and where we didn’t actually need to present the card for payment.

The advancement was the CVV2 number, and which was printed on the card. Unfortunately, now if someone discovered it, it was revealed for all time. It is this method that is one of our greatest threats to our payments infrastructure, and an intruder either tricks the user into…