Here’s How to Redress Security Breach Faced By 3.2 Million Debit Cards

By Atul Singh, Regional Director – Banking and Transport (India Subcontinent) at Gemalto 

Following the security breakdown that compromised over 3.2 million debit cards issued by prominent Indian banks, it is high time that mag-stripe cards issued by banks for ATM transactions be replaced at the earliest. While in the present context of security breach, the concerned banks are blocking the debit cards to minimize the impact, however the already ongoing replacement of mag-stripe cards with EMV chip cards, will help the banks. This is line with the RBI directive to issue EMV chip and PIN enabled cards. According to industry estimates, around 400 million mag-stripe cards have to be migrated to EMV standard in the next two years while nearly 120 million cards would have been migrated this year.

Further, banks need to work towards gradually enabling EMV chip-and-PIN card acceptance and processing at ATMs to enhance the safety and security of transactions avoiding a repeat of the situation at hand.While the POS terminal infrastructure in the country has been enabled to accept and process EMV Chip and PIN cards, the ATM infrastructure, on the whole, continues to process the card transactions based on data from the magnetic stripe. As a result, the ATM card transactions remain vulnerable to skimming, cloning, etc. frauds, even though the cards are EMV Chip and PIN based. Therefore, in line with RBI’s directive of May 26th 2016, to all banks to upgrade ATM’s to accept chip and PIN by Sep 2017, banks must take immediate measures to implement on a fast track mode.

Malware attacks and cyber threats have affected countries like Japan and Bangladesh in the recent past and banks in India will have to make special efforts to ensure that their most sensitive data is protected with multiple levels of authentication and industry standard encryption, ensuring data security at all points of transaction.”