For the more curious types of people, there has always been the want to find out what kind of data is hidden on those mag stripes on the back of your drivers license, credit cards, and other ID cards. I’ve been dabbling in magstripe gear for a couple of years now and it’s really astonishing the kind of info they will put onto a college ID card.
What do you need to read magstripe cards? Only a card reader and some free open source software. You can even make a reader if you want to save money!
Once you’ve got a reader and the software, it’s really easy to use. Depending on which reader you have, you either have to run StripSnoop in character mode (if your reader connects through your keyboard port) or just run it normally if you have a serial card reader. To run it in character mode, just use -c for the arguments when you run the program. Once you run the program, all you have to do is run your card through your reader and it will output the data that is on that card.
There are a few things to keep in mind. Depending on your reader, you may or not see all the info. If you have a track one reader, it will only read track one (of the three on the card), if you’ve a track two reader, you’ll only see track so and so on. There are only three tracks on magstripe cards.
I’ve been told if you just move the card up a few millimeters you can read another track, but that has yet to work for me and my two readers.
For information on how to read the data that is given to you with StripeSnoop, please see this documentation:
