Over Half a Million Credit Cards Intercepted from Network Solutions

Network Solutions servers were breached to the tune of 573,000 credit card numbers. For nearly three months between March 12, 2009 and June 8, 2009 credit card numbers were siphoned off of web sites that used Network Solutions as their payment processor according to the Washington Posts Security Fix web site.

Web servers hosting their payment processing applications were installed with malicious code that captured customers credit card numbers. This type of attack would be invisible to the victim until they noticed their card being used without their permission. Orders on websites would still process normally, but the credit card number would be forwarded to the hackers database.

Remember to check your credit every 12 months or earlier. The official site for checking your credit can be hard to find. There are many companies that charge for this service, but you shouldn't have to pay if you only want to view it every 12 months. Visit this site for more information.

Tokenized Payments. Storing Your Customer Data in the Cloud

Tokenized payments are all the rage so what are they all about?


What is cloud computing?
Cloud computing is a style of computing in which virtualized resources are provided as a service over the Internet. For our purposes, tokenized payments is a place to store your sensitive customer data like credit card numbers.

How do token payments work?
Simply put, the customer information name, credit card number and other information are sent to the provider or the gateway. The gateway returns a token. The next time you want to perform a transaction that token is used instead of passing the credit card number.

What are the advantages of token payments?
There are several advantages to offloading sensitive customer data.

• Data is stored safely and securely
• No storage of credit card numbers reduces the Payment Card Industries rules and regulations on your company. Expensive audits are reduced to a self assessment questionnaire in most cases.
• Reduced programming costs
• Some gateways offer eChecks and credit card data storage.
• Rebilling is made easy since you have the payment information

Providers that offer tokenized payments.Token payments are relatively new, but the list is growing.

Braintree

Cybersource

USEPay

Stripe