By Doug

Yesterday, as part of a two year investigation with the cooperation or international law enforcement agencies, the FBI seized three dozen 'carding' websites used to sell credit card data stolen during computer breaches or 'hacks.'   

Carding sites are very common on the internet which speaks to the number of breaches that occur.  Statistics tell us that about 90% of breaches in which credit card data is compromised occur to small businesses.  

Although PCI DSS compliance is not a guarantee that a business cannot be breached, reaching and maintaining PCI compliance is one of the tools that can help prevent it.

The article can be found here.

By Nathan Wright

That was the title of a session at last week's Electronic Transaction Association (ETA) annual conference. The consensus response was the ever present risk of fraud and security breaches.  As a lead member on the Best Practices Committee of the ETA, Wind River Financial has a long and active history of promoting data security in the payments industry and merchant community.

But while there is no silver bullet to prevent fraud, the risks can be mitigated, and you can rest more comfortably, if you employ a multi faceted security program.  A program that often times is simply based upon industry best practices: enforcing security policies, conducting background checks, securing physical and digital data (receipts, reports, files, etc), utilizing network firewalls and conducting periodic scans.

A high profile breach like the credit card data compromise that occurred at Global Payments made national headlines recently and served as another wake up call to the industry. So regardless if you are already awake at night worrying about fraud, or needed a wake up call to remind you that security is an ongoing event, now is a good time for a security audit. Take the opportunity to review your data security program and renew your commitment to act as a guardian of your customers' sensitive data.

Suggested steps include:

• verify your hiring policy includes background checks

• validate that your external payment partners and processors are PCI compliant

• confirm your internal systems and networks (which are in, or connected to, the payment stream) are PCI compliant

• ensure your networks are being scanned periodically by a certified scanner (remember you want to scan your network before a hacker does!)

• analyze your payment procedures to identify if credit card data is being stored - and follow general guidelines - if you don't need it, don't store it; but if you do need it, encrypt it or tokenize it. (read more about tokenization)
  

 

And most importantly, if you do find any holes or weak links in your security policies, commit to closing or reinforcing those vulnerabilities before they are compromised...so we can all sleep better.
 

Since the Durbin Amendment regulating debit interchange took effect on October 1st, 2011, most eRetailers are not realizing the benefits. An Internet Retailer survey recently revealed only 14.6% of 254 online merchants say they're paying lower fees on debit card transactions; 17.7% say they're paying more and 67.7% say their fees have not changed in the past year (Click here to view article). Why is that?

By: Amanda Block

By Dan DeBraal