Has anyone got one?

What sort of information can you get out of a card? And how much can be stored on one card.

E.g., laundry cards. Surely it won't be too difficult to identify how it stores the amount of money on your card?

Or underground/rail tickets. That would probably be more difficult, but still possible?

I don't quite understand what exactly you want to know here?

A reader and writer will do just that.. Read and write data stored on magnetic strips.

If for example, you were to put through a credit card you would be able to see information, but it won't be in the format of just plain english, Credit Cards will have Track1&Track2 information which, if you haven't seen what this looks like before, is going to look like complete jibberish to you..

It'll probably work on most things yes. Although some might just spit rawdata back at you at which point you'll be Googling shit like

sure5nt24qgt6n7svwhtrcq26nt5rvqt3ryng aw45lolozzbuttsexht7w8cnhtw43

I was thinking by modifying the parameters (like putting different amounts of money on it) and scanning it repeatedly, I might figure out how to decode the bits that interest me. Unless of course they're not retards and are using better encryption than that.

Edit: And unless it checks the date and time somehow, I'll probably be able to "restore" my stats to a previous state by simply writing over the same information again and again.

I won't steal money through it, but just playing around with it sounds interesting. The average Joe doesn't have a swipe card writer, so I guess your average company won't worry to much about securing the swipe data.

I don't know what you're trying to do.

Scan simple shit like meal cards at school or scan debit/credit cards and the like?

The reason debit card scams work is because all you need to do is read the card (and save the data) and have the persons pin. Then you simply write the same data to a blank card. You can't edit this data in any way, because the amount of money isn't stored in the card, it's stored in servers on the banks side. Same thing with credit cards, you can't edit them to raise the limit or anything, the only thing that editing them would do is give you someone else's credit card.

For low-tech things like gift cards, meal cards, etc, I'm pretty sure the amount of money stored is kept on the card itself, so you might be able to open it up with a hex editor (or if it's encrypted you'd need to decrypt it (nearly impossible unless you know what you're doing) and mess around with values.

There are editors out there that are better at detecting change. So if you scan an empty card, a 5 dollar card, and a 10 dollar card, and see what values have changed, you might stand a chance of breaking it.

Good luck.

Others, like my school food account are completely unencoded. It looks something like this

The credit values are stored like so:
1234 would be $12.34
123400 would be $1234.00

makstripe r2TAO or something like that will cost about 270$. I have one. Bought it to end a bout of boredom after breaking up with (dumping) my ex.

For school accounts we just have ID numbers, so you can clone someone elses card if you want, but not modify $ in accounts.

our school has something like

001123001231230a5d3
|--------|00|-------|-|===

institution code, 00, student ID number, number of times the card has been lost, checksum.

metro cards store the value on the card (look up the MIT, defcon thing, the full report is out there.

One problem will be LoCo-HiCo. - low and high coercivity. Most cards from institutions are high coercivity - you wont' be able to write over these, but you can read from all three data tracks. Low Coercivity can be (re)written with impunity.



Nice to see you still around Rykoshet.

http://www.crobike.de/en/werbemittel_bilder/promopeddler/9900/20704.jpg

Just sayin'...

FF 23 A7 3C B0 B8 3F...

et cetera.

Theoretically? Damn near limitless.

Realistically? Maybe a couple kilobytes, of which less than a hundred bytes will probably be used.

How's it hanging?

Pretty good. I got pwned by the rentacops at uni, so I had to take some time off &t to keep sqeaky clean, but its nice to see that we have the same mix of knowledgable posters and newbs here. (Also nice to see the summer newb flood is over.)