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Viewing posts tagged Security and Economics

the-express-scripts-bounty

Now this could be interesting. Express Scripts is offering $1,000,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the attacker trying to blackmail them. That is a lot of Ameros.

tjx-5-takeaways

Computerworld has a summary commemorating the one-year anniversary of the TJX breach. I agree with the article. The PCI Standard is a work in progress; Bad guys are hard to catch; etc.

value-protection-and-information-security

There is a very interesting article (and old one - sorry, I'm running behind) on CSO Online called Value Made Visible about how American Water's Bruce Larson has developed a security metric call Value Protection:

The basic Value Protection metric is a ratio that looks like this: Value Protection = Normal Operations Cost ($) – Event Impact ($) / Normal Operations Cost ($). In formula:

visa-adds-carrot-to-stick-for-pci-goulash

This will be interesting to look back on in a year: Visa is creating a $20,000,000 bonus pool to incent their members to be PCI compliant. :

Visa's new Visa PCI Compliance Acceleration Program is designed to spur entities that are covered by PCI rules to comply in a speedy fashion, said Jennifer Fischer, a director with Visa USA. "This program is part of our larger strategy for protecting card holder data and to ensure that we are doing everything we can to protect it from compromise," she said.
Why is it needed? Because:
Though nearly 18 months have passed since PCI rules went into full effect, only 36% of Tier 1 merchants and 15% of Tier 2 merchants are currently compliant with the requirements, according to Visa.
I think this might be the more effective bit:
At the same time, acquiring banks that fail to ensure compliance by Sept. 30, 2007 will be assessed fines starting at $5,000 a month for each non-compliant merchant. The fines increase to $25,000 per month for each non-compliant merchant after Dec. 31, 2007. Until now, fines have only been assessed in cases where actual data breaches occurred.
That will get them going!

visibility-and-pci-security

I'm a fan the PCI security standard from Visa, Mastercard and American Express. It is a tight in all the right ways and loose in the right ways. It tells credit card processors and merchants explicity that they must use two-factor authentication for remote access, but nothing more. If PCI has a problem, it is that it will be too little too late to protect card holder data and stave off regulation. The structure of the credit card industry makes it tough for it to be otherwise. Will making retailers liable for credit card breaches help? I'm not sure.

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