Google Wallet Security Issue: Company Restores Prepaid Cards

By Karla Robinson
February 16, 2012

Google Wallet has fixed its prepaid card security problem that came to light last week. Before the fix, anyone could “clear the app data from Google Wallet, reopen it, and gain access to the prepaid card,” explains The Verge.
In response, Google had temporarily shut down provisioning for the prepaid cards.
“The same firm that originally cracked Google’s PIN for Wallet, zvelo, has confirmed that it is possible to achieve root permissions on an Android device without actually clearing its data. Typically, when rooting a device, all data on it gets erased, eliminating most Wallet concerns. With zvelo’s new method for achieving root-level permissions, the original cracking attack on Google Wallet could be applied to non-rooted users,” explains the post.
Zvelo also noted that physical access to the device is not required to gain access to data: “a malicious app could initiate a brute-force attack to guess your Google Wallet PIN code, obtain root-level device access (even on a handset that hasn’t been tampered with by the user), and then transmit the data back to a remote server.”

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