14 DAY TRIAL // It's not easy to operate with millions of dollars daily or to work with thousands or hundreds of thousands of accounts without botching up anything. But as if things weren't hard enough to do for all those big companies out there, they also have to worry about hackers now. After all the recent news with a huge amount of enterprises getting hacked, data getting stolen etc., some firm leaders are scared out of their pants. And to be honest, it's understandable - AT&T got hit by hackers, TJX had data stolen (more than 46 million credentials).
This is why, at the moment a lot of retailers in the United States proposed that they should not be compelled to store credit-card data, following a transaction. They're basically thinking that if they have no valuable information for hackers to desire, they won't get hacked.
The National Retail Federation sent a letter to the Payment Card Industry Security Standards council, requesting changes in how the credit card industry requires merchants to store credit card data. "All of us -- merchants, banks, credit card companies and our customers -- want to eliminate credit card fraud," said NRF Chief Information Officer David Hogan in the letter. "But if the goal is to make credit card data less vulnerable, the ultimate solution is to stop requiring merchants to store card data in the first place."
"With this letter, we are officially putting the credit card industry on notice," said Hogan. "Instead of making the industry jump through hoops to create an impenetrable fortress, retailers want to eliminate the incentive for hackers to break into their systems in the first place."
"If all merchants took advantage of this option, credit card companies and their member banks would be the only ones with large caches of data on hand, and could keep and protect their card numbers in whatever manner they wished," said Hogan. "The bottom line is that it makes more sense for credit card companies to protect their data from thieves by keeping it in a relatively few secure locations than to expect millions of merchants scattered across the nation to lock up their data for them."
I, for one, think that this should be a very efficient way to curb the number of hacks that occur. It's enough that some firms don't cope with security measures, but having them store a lot of data without keeping it safe is not something recommendable, in my opinion. If this is accepted, then it's bound to make a difference!