Trust Your Fellow Man, But Not A Tired Store Associate
Written by Walter ConwayJuly 1st, 2010
Visa advice for dealing with the latest skimming attacks puts much emphasis on employee vigilance. But PCI Columnist Walt Conway is not so sure that he would depend solely on store managers and POS staff to monitor POS devices for signs of tampering.
"It seems to me, however, that these are also very busy people. Therefore, I prefer to rely on automated authentication and monitoring to detect rogue or suspect devices," he penned.
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One Comment | Read Trust Your Fellow Man, But Not A Tired Store Associate
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-Christine
July 9th, 2010 at 6:58 am
This is good article. It shows the problems of POS security in everyday life. I believe that there is no way to get ultimate security in the use of POS-Terminals as long as things that were described in the article can happen. Tighter restrictions and more technology in the use of the POS can help to a certain amount, but businesses always will ask for flexibility and mobility of their POS devices. Just think of the all the mobile POS devices connected via WIFI older mobile networks with their servers. Those devices make it easy and comfortable for people sitting outdoors in a restaurant to pay the bill. It even will make them feel more secure than giving the waiter the card, not knowing what he is doing with it backdoors. But all the actions that were suggested to make things more secure would not work on those devices. They get disconnected (loss of communication), get dirty (different weight), etc.
We need to make security the responsibility of the customer and his own devices. There are good examples like sending a TAN to his mobile device and he would have to key that in to approve the payment. Security can’t rely simply on the POS-Terminal. We need a second piece of hardware and a second channel of communication in the customers’ sphere to make transactions more secure. The principles of possession (Hardware) and knowledge (PIN, TAN) in the hands of the customer will do a lot more in terms of transaction security than just looking at the merchants and their terminals.