What Security Are in Place to Protect Payment Information?
What Security Are in Place to Protect Payment Information?
Businesses that process payments, such as ecommerce retailers, restaurants, or hotels, need to prioritize payment security to maintain customer trust and avoid costly data breaches. They must also comply with industry standards and regulations.
To reduce the risk of unauthorized access to sensitive information, tokenization converts credit card data into unique tokens that are used to reference original payment data in a secure vault. This can deter cybercriminals and protect your customers’ privacy.
Encryption
The primary goal of encryption is to protect the confidentiality of data stored on computers or transmitted across the internet. Many organizations and standards bodies require or recommend that sensitive information be encrypted when stored at rest or in transit to prevent unauthorized third parties and threat actors from accessing it.
A firewall is a network security system that acts as a security guard to control what goes into and out of your business’s computer networks based on specific rules. Firewalls create a protective barrier between the trusted networks inside your business, such as your payment systems, and untrusted outside networks, such as the internet, to help prevent unauthorized access to your sensitive information and protect against the damage that can occur from a security breach.
Encrypting sensitive information reduces the risk of hacking and spoofing attacks where cybercriminals steal data and subsequently leak it over the dark web for others to use for identity theft or to blackmail you into paying them ransom. A data breach can destroy a company’s reputation, so businesses rely on encryption to avoid the damage.
Ensure your sensitive automate payments information is protected in-store, at rest, and in motion with Micro Focus SecureData Enterprise. Its format-preserving encryption, stateless tokenization, and data masking combines in a single platform to help enterprises, merchants, and payment processors eliminate the burden of PCI compliance and safeguard their high-value sensitive information.
Tokenization
Tokenization replaces sensitive data with a non-sensitive equivalent, called a token. A token looks like the real information, but cannot be used to carry out fraudulent transactions or reverse-engineered to reveal the original data. For example, a credit card token may look like an alphanumeric code that substitutes for the actual card number when it’s used in a payment transaction. Tokens can also be used to represent other types of sensitive data, including medical records, financial accounts and driver’s license information.
Threat actors want to steal personal information so that they can sell it or use it for identity theft. In the event of a breach, tokenization helps limit the damage by making the stolen information useless to criminals. In addition, tokenization reduces the organization’s overall risk of breach by reducing its footprint of protected customer data and lowering its compliance burden.
Tokenization allows businesses to maintain business processes that rely on customer payment data such as recurring billing, without storing the real credit or debit card information. When combined with a secure back-end system that protects the data in transit and at rest, tokenization provides a comprehensive solution to safeguard sensitive information and reduce the impact of a data breach. Tokenization is a valuable security measure that customers appreciate, as it shows a deep commitment to protecting their information and fosters customer trust.
Password Protection
Cybercriminals target passwords to gain access to sensitive data, and it’s not just large corporations that get hit. Even your employees’ own habits can put their data at risk. They might share a password with a colleague, or use the same password on multiple websites. If hackers obtain that password, they can take over the account and steal your employees’ credit card information or other personal information.
Passwords are used to access online services like email, web sites and databases. They’re also used to protect devices like computer operating systems, mobile phones and cable TV decoders. Because so many password-protected services exist, it’s impossible for most users to memorize unique passwords for each service. As a result, they might fall victim to phishing scams, hacking or ransomware attacks and lose the data they’ve worked hard to secure.
When it comes to protecting passwords, best practices include requiring a mix of letters (both upper and lowercase), numbers and special characters, and changing them regularly. You might also consider imposing two-factor authentication, which requires a second means of identification in addition to a password. It can be as simple as sending a code via e-mail or text message, or it could involve a USB token or biometric security measures like facial recognition or fingerprint identification. In any case, these types of extra layers of protection prevent data breaches and other threats that compromise your customers’ trust.
Two-Factor Authentication
There isn’t a day that goes by without us logging in to our accounts to check email, post on social media, pay bills or shop. Each account contains a wealth of personal and financial information that needs to be protected against cyber-attacks like theft, fraud and data breaches. Passwords alone are not enough to protect these accounts and can be cracked in seconds using sophisticated hacking techniques. Two-factor authentication (also known as 2FA) adds a second layer of security to online accounts by requiring an additional verification step, often in the form of a unique code sent to your mobile device.
2FA can protect against many different types of cyber-attacks, from phishing to malware and beyond. It is a critical tool for all businesses and public institutions to implement, especially with the proliferation of devices that allow users to work from home or on the go.
Taking the time to enable 2FA can save your organization money and headaches in the long run by making it harder for attackers to gain access to sensitive systems or networks. The recent point-of-sale data security breaches at Target and Home Depot, affecting 90 million consumer payment cards, highlighted the need to go above and beyond PCI compliance requirements to protect against these devastating attacks. Fortunately, two-factor authentication is readily available from many providers including Duo.