Report: U.S. Leads the World in Point of Sale Malware Thanks to Magnetic Stripe

It’s not hard to be a little nervous when turning to mobile shopping options these days.

With all the hackings going on of late, swiping that card at the terminal is the thing that gives some consumers pause. A new report from Trend Micro, meanwhile, shows just how unnerving the picture really is, and it’s all thanks to one critical security vulnerability: the card itself.

The Trend Micro report presents the stark picture: around 30 percent of the world’s point of sale related malware infections are found in the United States, and much of this is traced back to the United States’ broad use of magnetic stripe payment cards.

Most of the infections in question, in fact, could be traced back to the use of such payment cards, with places like Canada and the United Kingdom accounting for just two percent and three percent of such malware, respectively.

There’s even a solution for this, one that’s been in the works for some time but never made the full jump to reality.

The best solution is to switch over to the use of “chip-and-PIN” cards, cards which use a combination of a small chip backed up by a personal identification number (PIN). Turning to such cards, it’s said, would reduce fraud by as much as 40 percent, and could in turn make card use overall 700 percent more secure, based on a 2013 study from the Federal Reserve.

Of course, the upcoming move to the EMV standard for payment cards in the United States is going to be chip-and-signature, and while inherently more secure than magnetic-stripe, it’s debatably a step below chip-and-pin. The move to chip-and-signature will likely make it less profitable for evil-doers to target the point of sale, but security experts have widely agreed that the next target will be CNP (card not present) or online transactions.