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 A thin magnetic stripe is all that stands between Americans’ credit-card information and the bad guys. And they’ve been working hard to break in. Banks, law enforcement and technology companies are all trying to thwart a network of hackers who are swiping account numbers, names and other crucial data used in identity theft. More than 100 million accounts at Target, Neiman Marcus and Michaels stores were all affected in recent attacks, starting November 2013. Cards are increasingly vulnerable to attacks in store transactions. Hackers scoop up massive troves of credit-, debit- or prepaid-card numbers using malware inserted surreptitiously into the retailers’ checkout systems. Hackers then sold the data to a second group of criminals operating in shadowy corners of the web. Not long after, the stolen data was showing up on counterfeit cards and being used for online purchases. The solution could cost as little as $2 extra for every piece of plastic issued. The fix is a security technology used heavily outside the U.S. While American credit cards use the 40-year-old magstripe technology to process transactions, much of the rest of the world uses smarter cards with the EMV (short for Europay, MasterCard, Visa), a technology that employs a chip embedded in the card plus a customer PIN to authenticate every transaction on the spot. If a purchaser fails to punch in the correct PIN at the checkout, the transaction gets rejected. The cost of a magstripe card is in the dollar range. A chip-and-PIN card currently costs close to $3. Multiple $3 by 5 billion cards in circulation in the U.S. Then consider that there’s an estimated $12.4 billion in card fraud on a global basis. With 44% of that in the U.S., American credit-card fraud amounts to $5.5 billion annually. Card issuers find that absorbing the liability for even big hacks like the Target one is still cheaper than replacing all that plastic. That leaves American retailers pretty much alone the world over in relying on magstripe technology, and leaves consumers vulnerable. Ironically enough, the historical reason the U.S. has stuck with magstripe is the once superior technology. The nation’s cheap, ultra-reliable wired networks made credit-card authentication over the phone frictionless. In France, card companies created EMV partly because the telephone monopoly was so maddeningly inefficient and expensive. The workaround allowed transactions to be verified locally and securely.