Due to a massive identity theft case tried in the US, the spotlight is firmly on the safety of our credit card system and our identity. Although this is a simple enough problem, the answer may be far from simple. A number of security companies dealing in the e-commerce, told recently in press conferences that card information for both credit and debit cards is vulnerable but that they are putting massive amounts of time and money into rectifying this. In what was seen by many as a shock statement Perry Tancredi of VeriSign told a BBC reporter that credit and debit card information is just not incredibly secure, Perry is senior product manager for fraud detection this to me is one hell of a statement and scares me to death.

Now if that scares the pants of you here is his next statement. But it is counterbalanced by the amount of fraud losses due to cheque fraud and direct debit fraud which is much greater than credit card fraud. So I bet your much happier now. The long and short of that is spend money online and you will be ripped off, but do not go down the high street or you will be ripped of worse.
Mr Tancredi said regardless of how strong the security measures, and how vigilant, the weak part of the chain is there is always a human who is responsible and who has overall control over the information.
So then he appears to be saying that they are attempting to make the systems as safe as possible but you whilst you can trust the technology those pesky humans just cannot be trusted. So I guess what we all should do is expect to have somebody attempting to constantly beak into our accounts and make plans to stop them or at worse insure against them.

How about another point of view?

A totally different point of view comes from IDP, a company assesses online businesses for security or the lack of it. He maintains that after all of the recent publicity regarding security attacks, that the measures companies now have in place we are all a lot safer than we were before. There are safety procedures available but many retailers do not implement them in their business and therefore leave your data open to attack. Wireless access has been blamed for many breaches but top level encryption properly configured will keep attackers at bay. In the recent case it is sited that many of the breaches were in fact due to gaps in wireless technology and lack of encryption.

So the answer it would appear lies with the retail industry making sure that they take the correct precautions both in their online and their bricks and mortar businesses. However and this is the really big question for me, in the past 2 years in the UK we have had a major banking/building society and several government departments lose literally millions of peoples records on lap tops which have been lost or stolen. This data later to be found being sold on internet sites. So you can tighten up all you like on digital security at transaction level but if someone in charge allows millions of people’s data to be stored on a lap top that can be taken home by a relatively junior employee then we just might as well set up a web page and sell our own data to the highest bidder. At least we will earn something for it.

Author :  Geoffrey Hibbert