According to Engadget, Mythbusters was all set to do a show exposing the weak security behind most RFID implementations of Smart Cards, but was shut down by lawyers from “American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… [who] absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode.”
Since Discovery is an ad-supported channel, it’s not surprising that it backed down, but we’d say that the credit card industry would be far better served spending money on actually improving security rather than lawyering up and trying to keep consumers in the dark. Video after the break.
The New York Times reports that a team of scientists in the RFID Consortium for Security and Privacy (RFID-CUSP) were able to read the names, credit cards and expiration dates of recently issued credit cards using radio frequency identification transponders to enable customers to pay without swiping their cards.
The Smart Card Association (SCA) has dismissed claims by US researchers that a security flaw in RFID contactless payment cards leaves customers open to fraud.
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