Researchers at Cambridge University have warned shoppers of a chip and PIN concern after managing to hack into point of sale card machines to access confidential card information.
The researchers managed to reprogram a handheld chip and PIN machine through replacing its internal hardware with their own to access the sensitive data and demonstrated the extent of their control through enabling the machine to play Tetris.
As a warning, the group made a video of its findings, and said that they believe fraudsters could easily replicate their method.
Cited in This Is Money, UK payments association Apacs voiced its concern over this development but claimed that the process would be much more difficult in a retail environment, as opposed to a laboratory.
In March 2006, the same team at Cambridge University demonstrated chip and PIN terminal interceptor technology capable of accessing the communication between the card and the terminal, with the ability to modify transactions.