Organized gang members have been grabbing customer card data out of the air, where it has been unconscionably unencrypted, en route to a banking processing company for authorization. Other breaches are thought to have occurred when hackers tapped into Wi-Fi data streams generated by weakly encrypted wireless barcode scanners, broke the encryption code, and eavesdropped on user sessions to steal their network access credentials.

Barcode devices are perhaps most prone to the exclusive use of Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP, the older and easily crackable Wi-Fi encryption scheme. Many handheld barcode scanners don’t yet support stronger Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and WPA2 forms of encryption, often because of the older devices’ limited memory and CPU power.

Read this full article at NetworkWorld