Its been highly
publicized that Targets
point-of-sale system was breached last month. You may have been one of the
initial 40 million reportedly affected by the breach. Or maybe you were one of
the final estimated 100 million affected. Either way, fraudsters got their
hands on a lot of data. Now Neiman
Marcus has declared a data breach, which also took place in December. While
the company is staying quiet until the situation is fully investigated, these
two retailers may not be the only ones affected by this chain of big data
breaches. It could take weeks to determine if any other retailers were
affected.
Cyber attacks
against the payments infrastructure are evolving. Fraudsters go from the
payment processors to retailers directly gaining access to data. They are
finding weak spots in one retailers POS system then capitalizing on others who
have similar systems. The Target and Neiman Marcus breaches prove that even
large retailers are vulnerable to attacks, especially ones taking place through
point of sale systems. With that being said, one of the greatest security
concerns of the U.S. payments industry is poor POS integration.
While retailers may
take their time to report a breach due to investigation and collecting facts,
banks and credit unions are left replacing cards and covering losses suffered
from breaches, meaning timely notification is critical for them. In the end, banking
institutions may find it more cost effective to just reissue all compromised
cards rather than monitoring those cards for an extended period of time. Organizations
need to be ready for more card fraud linked to these retail compromises.
Whether there is a need to reissue new cards for any cards linked to the
attacks or enhancing monitoring cards that could have been compromised. Banking
institutions and retailers need to be proactive while waiting for the next
attack, anticipate and answer questions from anxious customers and work on
securing their systems with better integration and layered security.
[Contributed by EVS
Marketing]
