With every swipe of a credit card this holiday season, consumers put their faith in the companies that process and store their information. Yet, it is no secret that data breaches are on the rise, hitting companies large and small. Massive data breaches recently struck Target and Home Depot, to just name a few, and these two breaches alone affected hundreds of millions of consumers and cost the companies hundreds of millions of dollars.… More
Tag Archives: credit cards
PCI-DSS Update: The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council Issues Guidelines for Security Risk Assessments, Cloud Computing, and Accepting Payments on Mobile Devices
Merchants who accept credit cards have a duty to protect customer information, not only by law (see, e.g., 201 CMR 17.00), but also because the credit card companies tell them so. The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council was created by Visa, MasterCard and American Express to tell merchants precisely what they are supposed to do to protect consumers. Merchants must follow the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) or risk fines or losing the ability to process credit cards. … More
Incident of the Week (Year?): Hacker Responsible for Largest Data Breach in U.S. History Indicted
According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, yesterday an "indictment was returned against three individuals who are charged with being responsible for five corporate data breaches, including the single largest reported data breach in U.S. history." According to the press release, the indictment describes a scheme whereby Albert "Segvec" Gonzalez and two unnamed Russian defendants (identified as "Hacker 1"… More