Geoff
Hibbert,
Due to a massive
identity theft case tried in the US, the
spotlight is firmly on the safety of our credit
card system and our identity.
Although this is a
simple enough problem, the answer may be far
from simple.
A number of
security companies dealing in the e-commerce,
told recently in press conferences that card
information for both credit and debit cards is
vulnerable but that they are putting massive
amounts of time and money into rectifying
this.
In what was seen
by many as a shock statement Perry Tancredi of
VeriSign told a BBC reporter that credit and
debit card information is just not incredibly
secure, Perry is senior product manager for
fraud detection this to me is one hell of a
statement and scares me to death.
Now if that scares
the pants of you here is his next statement.
But it is counterbalanced by the amount of
fraud losses due to cheque fraud and direct
debit fraud which is much greater than credit
card fraud. So I bet your much happier now. The
long and short of that is spend money online
and you will be ripped off, but do not go down
the high street or you will be ripped of
worse.
Mr Tancredi said
regardless of how strong the security measures,
and how vigilant, the weak part of the chain is
there is always a human who is responsible and
who has overall control over the
information.
So then he appears to be saying that they are
attempting to make the systems as safe as
possible but you whilst you can trust the
technology those pesky humans just cannot be
trusted. So I guess what we all should do is
expect to have somebody attempting to
constantly beak into our accounts and make
plans to stop them or at worse insure against
them.
How about another point of view
A totally different point of view comes from
IDP, a company assesses online businesses for
security or the lack of it. He maintains that
after all of the recent publicity regarding
security attacks, that the measures companies
now have in place we are all a lot safer than
we were before. There are safety procedures
available but many retailers do not implement
them in their business and therefore leave your
data open to attack. Wireless access has been
blamed for many breaches but top level
encryption properly configured will keep
attackers at bay. In the recent case it is
sited that many of the breaches were in fact
due to gaps in wireless technology and lack of
encryption.
So the answer it would appear lies with the
retail industry making sure that they take the
correct precautions both in their online and
their bricks and mortar businesses. However and
this is the really big question for me, in the
past 2 years in the UK we have had a major
banking/building society and several government
departments lose literally millions of peoples
records on lap tops which have been lost or
stolen. This data later to be found being sold
on internet sites. So you can tighten up all
you like on digital security at transaction
level but if someone in charge allows millions
of people’s data to be stored on a lap top that
can be taken home by a relatively junior
employee then we just might as well set up a
web page and sell our own data to the highest
bidder. At least we will earn something for
it.
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Copyright 2008. All
Rights Reserved. Geoff Hibbert T/A Credit Repair
UK.