That’s right. Welcome to the dawn of a new era of cybercrime!! Ok not really, but the headline is as it reads. You can now add petrol pumps to the long list of potential places that your personal data can be hacked.

According to Visa, cybercrime groups have pinpointed a weakness in petrol station point-of-sale (POS) networks to steal your credit card data. There have been several incidents in the USA where a hacking group known as Fin8 managed to defraud petrol dispenser merchants by gaining access to the POS network via malicious emails and other unknown means. It was then just a mere matter of installing the POS scraping software, which exploited the lack of security that comes with good ol’ fashioned magnetic stripe cards.

The hack doesn’t affect the more up to date and secure chip cards but unfortunately, not everyone has that. Which is why petrol terminals in the USA often come with mag strip readers as well. Unencrypted data is apparently being intercepted by the thieves and there’s not much Visa can do about it.

The company has already advised petrol merchants to encrypt data while it’s transferred or use a chip-and-PIN policy. In May this year, Visa announced that petrol merchants are going to have to update to chip readers by October 2020. Any stations without it will be pretty much be liable for any fraud. The problem however, is that most of these stations still have very old technology and will have to replace the entire pump, which is estimated to cost them up to $250,000 per station, so it’s not exactly an ideal situation over in the USA.

Here in Malaysia, petrol stations come with chip readers so this really isn’t much of a problem. Regardless though, it’s important to know whats the state of things these days. In general, magnetic stripe readers tend to be less secure than that of a chip reader so do keep in mind what and where you’re swiping if you do come across a terminal that utilizes a mag stripe instead of a chip reader.