Visa admits flaw in system
In a sudden reversal of attitudes from my previous blog entry on the Citibank Visa Scandal, Visa has finally admited that certain terminals do insecurely store confidential customer information. In a zdnet article entitled “Visa warns software may store customer data”, the equipment in question are retail solutions from Fujitsu Transaction Solutions used by retailers such as Best Buy, Staples and OfficeMax.
In my previous blog, I asked if retailers in the Philippines are affected. The article states:
Bank of America, Washington Mutual and Citibank are among the financial institutions that have replaced more than 200,000 debit cards in the past two months and have told customers that thieves obtained vital debit-card information as a result of a security breach at a large merchant.
One commonality among the fraud victims, according to law enforcement and banking officials, is that most had shopped at one of Fujitsu’s clients: OfficeMax.
Looks like we are pretty safe for now. The incident seems to be limited to OfficeMax and that only a particular POS system is vulnerable. So, as long as our retailers keen their internal systems secure, we are fine. It is most likely that OfficeMax did not mean to leak the information but some evil insider was able to get his hands on it and sell the information on the Internet.
April 5th, 2006 at 12:31 am
[…] The general sentiment in Slashdot is that this law might not pass at all due to its anti-business nature or that it might be lamed with exceptions. Knowing the pro-business nature of the current American government I think a laming provision will be added. But, laws like these are needed to protect customer information. This is specially important in the light of the Visa PIN Scandal. […]