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Hi there, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.

My name is Chris Paulette.

I'm an editor here at How Stuff Works.

And today I have with me in the studio right here sitting here

Jonathan Strickland one of our writers in the flesh yep and today we are going to talk

about some encryption things, things that you might want to keep an eye on because this could be an issue of great personal significance.

Yes, in fact it was an issue of great personal significance for about 40 million people recently.

Actually probably not that many.

That was the total number of people affected by a recent discovery. The federal government had a sting operation where they identified

11 international computer hackers who are accused of stealing the information of 40 million people and some of that included

PIN numbers which was a that's huge news.

Yeah because the thing about it is if somebody hats your debit card number, they can't do an awful lot with it unless they have your PIN, your personal identification number.

Right. So for hackers to get hold of the number and the PIN, then they're in business because that allowed

them to create, or at least their authorities are alleging that they were able to create fake debit cards

with numbers and they were allowed to get, use those to get money.

Yeah, they could go to any ATM and use that and put in the PIN number.

Because the number and the PIN matched, the ATM had no way of knowing that this was someone impersonating an innocent victim and the guy could withdraw money.

Now whether or not this actually happened, well that remains to be seen.

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