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Credit Card Security |
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This is the age of plastic money. It's not uncommon for the
typical consumer in the western world to go weeks at a time without
ever handling a coin or bill. Everything we need is available to
us with the simple "swik-swik' sound of a credit card sliding through a
reader. Supplies for the office, flowers for the wife, meals and
drinks out, and an endless supply of useful products available for sale
through the Internet can all be bought with naught a cent to be
seen.
The big question is: "How safe is all this plastic?"
Cash has its obvious benefits. When you buy a sandwich for $2.95
and you hand the cashier a $5 bill, you know you haven't been ripped
off when he hands you $2.05 right then and there. But when you
hand your card to a waitress at the local chain restaurant, how do you
know she hasn't taken a moment to sneak into the office and copy your
card number and signature? You don't, and the implications of
this question are having a serious effect on credit card companies and
the merchants they do business with.
In response to these issues, the big credit card companies have
developed more secure ways to do business. MasterCard International and
Visa got together and came up with a set of guidelines called the
Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards. This is a list of
12 guidelines that imposes strict regulations on all transactions
taking place between the card company and the merchants it trades
with. While these standards have been in place since 2005,
merchants are taking some time to catch up to them. However, in
the past year there has been marked improvement, and both credit card
companies have stepped up their tactics to the point where merchants
may be experiencing losses of service if they do not fall in line
soon. (You can read the 12 guidelines and the details of this
plan on the homepages of Visa or MasterCard.)
Discover Card has responded to the pressure for more secure methods
with it's own program. They call it the Secure Online Account
Number program. Anytime you use your Discover card to purchase a
product online, their program will generate a random account number to
"stand-in" for the one on your card. You then send this number to
the merchant in place of the real number. When the
number is verified with Discover Card, it will link to your account and
the purchase is charged to you. The benefit of this system is
that the merchant never sees your true account number. Only you
and Discover Card have access to it. Once the transaction is
completed the randomly generated account number is no longer valid, so
any attempts to use it result in denial.
A security method that online merchants are employing is the
requirement of a shipping address that matches the billing address on
your credit card. This is to guard against thieves who may steal
your account number but will have no access to your billing
address. This way, if your card is stolen, it can only be used to
make purchases that will ship to your address. Any prospective
thieves will have to pick up their orders from your mailbox, not
something the average anonymity-seeking thief will want to
do.
There are also third party systems in place for ensuring online credit
card security. VeriSign's SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) technology
is the leader in the field. VeriSign will give each merchant it
conducts business with 2 "keys" (like coding alphabets), a public key
and a private key. The public key is used to encrypt information,
and the private key is used to decipher it. VeriSign's technology
now offers this encryption in 128- to 256-bit encryption, which
provides a nearly un-guessable number of possible combinations of
codes.
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