It's no longer just a possibility. Visa and MasterCard are the latest victims of a security breach. Global Payments, an international credit card processor, on Sunday confirmed that hackers had stolen credit card numbers of as many as 1.5 million customers.
Whether the problem is careless or malicious insiders or criminal networks looking to monetize their exploits for financial and ideological gain, every organization must be diligent about protecting customer  data , Lawrence Reusing, general manager for mobile security at Imation Corp., told us Monday morning.
"Today, companies are investing billions of dollars in the IT security industry's best-of-breed solutions," Reusing said. "Organizations need to layer their information network with technologies that protect the network itself from outside intrusion, the data and proprietary information that resides on it, and the easily lost or stolen mobile devices employees use to access the network and work out of the office."
Remembering Heartland
Neil Roiter, research director at Corero Network Security, also shared some thoughts with us on the topic. As he sees it, this latest breach shows that three years after the Heartland Payment Systems breach of 130 million credit card numbers, credit card data is still vulnerable.
"The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is highly prescriptive in nature, but simply complying does not ensure credit card security," Roiter said. "Companies that rely on PCI DSS to solely dictate their security measures will continue to remain vulnerable to attack."
We also asked Mike Potts, CEO of Lancope, for his insights into the Visa and MasterCard breach. His conclusion: The perimeter-based approach is not sufficient and fails to protect critical data and internal resources that bypass these point solutions. What's more, he said, enterprises must find new ways to deal with online security issues that are made more complex by IT consumerization, mobility and movement to the cloud .
"Unfortunately, traditional tools such as firewalls, antivirus and [intrusion detection and prevention systems] are no longer enough to protect against rapidly evolving zero-day and insider attacks," Potts said. "Companies must instead seek out next-generation solutions such as flow-based monitoring to obtain the comprehensive network visibility they need to thwart today's more targeted and sophisticated threats." (continued...)
Jay:
Posted: 2012-04-05 @ 4:41pm PT
In the wake of Global Payments' data breach, there has been a lot of advice on what people should do to protect themselves, but way too often we are asked to do more than what's needed and that can needlessly lead to different issues. However, while the damage done by the hackers is real, they cannot harm us without first tricking us into revealing the information they don't yet have (name, address, SSN). So as long as we are cautious and don't give our personal information to strangers, we will do just fine. For more: http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/how-to-respond-to-the-global-payments-data-breach.
Jay:
Posted: 2012-04-04 @ 4:03pm PT
From what we know, the Global Payments hackers may have managed to gain access to Track 2 data, which includes the account number, the card's expiration date and some other pieces of data, but not the cardholder's name, address, SSN and the card security code. So cardholders should now be on a high alert for phishing attacks, which may be employed by the criminals as a way to obtain the missing data. Of course, that depends on the hackers having obtained their victims' email addresses, which we don't know. For more: http://blog.unibulmerchantservices.com/what-criminals-can-do-with-the-stolen-global-payments-data.
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