Phish and chips

Ross Anderson and his colleagues have successfully, if that be the right word, broken the EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) security protocol, popularly known as "Chip and PIN". This technology is widely used in Europe and other parts of the world, including South Africa, to secure bank cards. For more see:

• The blog entry
• The press release
• The FAQ
• The technical paper (to appear at the annual IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May 2010)

Anderson's book is still the best available general text on the engineering issues around information and network security.