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iPhone Payment Peril: Mobile Mayhem Omen?
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August 5th, 2010
The iPhone retains everything typed into it through its onscreen keyboard, including payment-card data, for as long as a year. And that penchant for holding onto payment-card data is only the latest in a long line of mobile data catastrophes that are slowly materializing as mobile deployments start in earnest. Many apps are simply sloppy about the security of sensitive data. Last week (July 27), Citigroup admitted its iPhone mobile banking app stored account numbers and passcodes on the phone. We're just beginning to understand how little we know about mobile phones and how much more data they retain than we expect.
PCI guidelines and a whole slew of privacy laws are based on the assumption that a retailer might do something bad to expose payment-card data to a thief. A retailer's logical response in a case like this: "I didn't do it. The phone's operating system did." But that defense might not hold up if the retailer was aware of the problem and did nothing to avoid it. Further complicating the situation is the fact that there are ways to keep sensitive information out of the keyboard cache. Apple, however, is likely to bounce any app from its iTunes Store that uses such a workaround.
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One Comment | Read iPhone Payment Peril: Mobile Mayhem Omen?
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Our Comment SPAM system is getting very aggressive these days and has been blocking legitimate comments. If you post a comment and don't see it appear within 2 hours or so, can you please send a heads-up to customer-service@storefrontbacktalk.com? Ideally, please include the time you posted the comment. That will allow us to try and hunt for it. Thanks! P.S. We're working on fixing the system, but we don't want to lose any valuable comments in the meantime.
-Christine
August 5th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
This reminds me of the bank that had spent a considerable sum installing a state of the art vault. They got burglarized and thieves made up with the vault’s contents. How is that possible? The vault’s door was left open that day…You are only secure as your weakest link. Both the BlackBerry platform and the Android OS (java virtual machine running on linux, dedicated processes) are both considerably more secure than the iPhone. iPhone: pretty yes, secure, no.