If you payed attention to the comments on our story about a Magnetic stripe card emulator you would have seen Abend announce his Shmoocon talk. It was a pretty interesting talk about the basics of mag cards and some of the tricks employed by companies to obfuscate the data. To get the feel for the talk I suggest you listen to SploitCast #004 which features Abend as a guest. That combined with his slides and tools should give you a fine crash course in the technology. He also recommend’s Count Zero’s “A Day in the Life of a Flux Reversal“. Billy Hoffman, who did the Covert Crawler, has also worked with mag stripes and developed the program Stripe Snoop.
I definately recommend listening to the sploitcast episode(s), those guys are really well informed about this stuff, and they explain it all great.
Thanks for the plug guys. We just try to put out the best content we can in our little niche, and I hope that we can continue to bring the information to our audience. Join our forums and tell us what subjects you want information on.
i completely agree — listen to sploitcast; they’re doing a great job! this latest post is a great followup to the mentioned magnetic stripe card emulator. check that out and absolutely be sure to read the phrack article linked in the comments. its very good stuff.
also, i think its quite a shame that i’m only the third comment on this page. a tank made out of wood gets more attention than shmoocon?? i dont get it — this is where the most interesting stuff happens. just an observation. at any rate, big thanks to you eliot for providing the coverage.
I’ve designed and built a PIC circuit that will turn a TTL Magnetic card reader into a programmable personal lock. In learn mode it’s taught to remember a card. Afterwords, it will only activate a “pass” output with this card. All others will fail.
http://www.ringolake.com/pic_proj/mag_card/mag_lock10.html