Data breach shows U.S. lags in card technology

The massive data breach at Target this past week has again highlighted how the United States remains a relatively insecure backwater when it comes to credit card technology.

Over the last decade, most countries have moved toward using credit cards that carry information on embeddable microchips rather than magnetic strips. The additional encryption on so-called smart cards has made the kind of brazen data thefts suffered by Target almost impossible to pull off in most other countries.

Because the U.S. is one of the few places yet to widely deploy such technology, the nation has increasingly become the focus of hackers seeking to steal such information. The stolen data can easily be turned into phony credit cards that are sold on black markets around the world.

“The U.S. is one of the last markets to convert from the magnetic stripe,” Randy Vanderhoof, director of the EMV Migration Forum. “There’s fewer places in the world where that stolen data could be used. So the U.S. becomes more of a high-value target.”

EMV stands for Europay, MasterCard and Visa and is the technology standard that involves placing an integrated circuit of some kind into a credit card. Most European and Asian countries began adopting the technology a decade ago, pushed by regulators in those countries.

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