This article originally appeared in Convenience Store News. Convenience Store News’ online content can be found here. It is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about technology momentum. The impacts of COVID-19 clearly show the tech influence on ways that businesses must now operate. For those retailers participating in the 2020 Convenience Store News…
Category: SECURITY+
Information Technology and Communication During COVID-19
With the ongoing pandemic, workers across the country have had their typical work locations shifted and displaced, often to haphazard home office setups, with some organizations scrambling to enable their workforce to work from home. Resulting from this of course is the obvious chaos, shuffling of duties and tasks, and a general overhaul of how…
Analysis of the Texas AFD Anti-Skimming Regulation
Introduction to the Regulation On September 1st, 2019 Texas Legislature created Chapter 607 of the Texas Business and Commerce code related to card skimmers on automated fuel dispensers (AFDs). This chapter requires petroleum merchants to implement procedures to prevent, detect, and report the installation of skimmers on their unattended AFDs. The Office of the Attorney…
Multi-Factor Authentication and Security Practices Within Office 365
Nearly all organizations experience incoming security threats. Whether it’s via email, malware, or otherwise, organizations must equip themselves with the set of tools to be proactive in blocking and defending themselves against such threats. Organizations in the financial and payment processing sector are unfortunately targeted at a higher rate than others, simply due to the…
Circumventing Mobile Fraud Protections
With many payment channels, bad actors seek to take advantage of vulnerabilities to secure goods or funds at little to no cost to them; the same holds true for mobile payment applications. With each merchant mobile app implementation, different combinations and permutations of entry points for fraudsters arise, and in my experience, it’s the combination…
Data Privacy and the Consumer Relationship
The conversation around data privacy and trust is evolving. In allowing consumers the right to access and the right to delete personal information that a merchant maintains, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was the first sweeping law of its kind. The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) followed not long after, and Washington state has…
Whitepaper: Data Privacy
From the Target and Home Depot breaches to Marriott’s most recent breach weeks ago, data breaches are becoming a near-daily part of the standard news cycle. In response to the increasing concern over consumer data privacy, numerous government entities are evaluating and drafting consumer data privacy protection laws. The European Union was a first mover…
CaaS/MaaS – Crime as a Service/Malware as a Service
Technology has always proven to be a double-edged sword throughout history; as the world improves technology standards and efficiency, so do the bad guys. The latest iteration of threats come in the form of what we know today as SaaS, but are re-engineered for malicious purposes and redefined as CaaS (crime as a service). As…
The MYTH of getting robbed from your pocket via Contactless Payments
While navigating on social media, I found a video around contactless fraud. The video warns people to be protective of their wallets as he initiated a contactless transaction with another person who carried his wallet inside his back pocket (you can see the video here). Of course, a video like this can generate reactions that…
Simple Security Tips for Consumers
We see a steady stream of news stories about data breaches that result in damage to company reputations, impact to share valuation, cost to implement new security measures and in many cases fines and/or penalties to cover the cost of associated fraud. In the payments and security world, we tend to focus on the IT…
India Drafts Policy to Reduce Influence of Large Tech Companies
The following has been re-posted from Loyalty360. The original article can be found here. The draft of a new e-commerce policy has emerged in India, one that calls for a “level playing field” between Indian businesses and global competitors. The policy, if enacted, would require tech companies like Amazon or Google to store data collected…
My Compliance Assessment Didn’t Go Well… Now What?
It’s a scary situation: after all the meetings, evidence gathering and reviews, the compliance assessment comes back with red flags. Regardless of the type of compliance assessment (PCI, SOX, SOC-2, etc.) the prospect of fines and/or business interruptions can put a dark cloud over any organization. So what do you do if it happens? There…