What is Card Skimming? And How to Protect Your Customers

Occasionally lax security by some merchants enables criminals to easily steal and use personal consumer financial information from payment card transactions and processing systems.  It’s a serious problem – more than 234 million records with sensitive information have been breached since January 2005, according to Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.org.   As a business or nonprofit accepting donations, you are at the center of payment card transactions so it is imperative that you use standard security procedures and technologies to thwart theft of cardholder data.  Merchant-based vulnerabilities may appear almost anywhere in the card-processing ecosystem including point-of-sale devices; personal computers or servers; wireless hotspots or Web shopping applications; in paper-based storage systems; and unsecured transmission of cardholder data to service providers.    Today, we will focus on a main concern for any business that accepts payments.   Michael's was a recent example of the vulnerabilities of even the enterprise level businesses.  http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2011/05/michaels-stores-hit-by-credit-card-skimming.html

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