請依下文回答第 20 題至第 25 題 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.
【題組】24 Why haven’t big banks in the U.S. adopted the more secure technology?
(A) The cost for new cards is higher than the liability old cards may cause.
(B) Credit-card frauds in the U.S. are pretty low, causing little liability.
(C) The new technology is far from perfect, and may cause many problems.
(D) Big hacks like the Target one are very rare.