Fraud & Security

In the wake of high-profile retailer data breaches and mounting political pressure to address security flaws in the nation’s payment card system, Visa Inc. and MasterCard Inc. on Friday said they were forming a “cross-industry group” to enhance payment security. The leading card networks said in a joint news release …

Given the massive news coverage about payment card security since December in the wake of Target Corp.’s huge data breach and other ones at Neiman Marcus Group and Michaels, you might think that data protection is top of mind among small-business owners. Not so, according to results of a new …

A recent study by First Annapolis Consulting Inc. found that 22 of the nation’s 30 largest debit card issuers are actively replacing cards in the wake of retailer Target Corp.’s massive data breach. Meanwhile, a suburban Chicago bank warned customers not to use their debit cards in Chicago taxicabs and …

  Consumers carrying around the next-generation Samsung Galaxy S5 smart phone will be able to use PayPal with a tap on the device’s biometric sensor. The smart phone, scheduled for release in April, will have a fingerprint sensor that enables consumers to use their online PayPal accounts to pay for …

  Mt. Gox, a well-known Bitcoin exchange, has shut down, leaving investors who had Bitcoins at the digital-currency exchange wondering what’s next. Bitcoin is a decentralized digital-payment system based on mathematically derived new Bitcoins coming into circulation by so-called “miners” using computers. News service Reuters reports today that the exchange …

In a rare piece of good, or least not as bad, news about the recent retailer payment card data breaches, upscale department-store chain Neiman Marcus Group says about 350,000 cards were compromised by the breach it disclosed in January, down from its earlier estimate of 1.1 million. The number of …

In the wake of recent data breaches at Target Corp. and other retailers, U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, author of a famous amendment that regulates debit card interchange, and an ally want to know how well a provision in the amendment that gives a debit card issuer an extra penny in …

EMVCo., the international standards body for chip cards based on the EMV specification, is fast-tracking a specification for card-number tokenization in the wake of recently disclosed data breaches at major retailers, including the theft of card and other information on 110 million customers of Target Corp. The chip card organization …

Close to 60% of ISOs and other processors are reporting compliance rates of 40% or better among their portfolios of so-called Level 4 merchants, up about five percentage points from a year ago, according to a survey released by Atlanta-based security-solutions vendor ControlScan Inc. and the Merchant Acquirers’ Committee, a …

Target Corp. said on Tuesday that it passed its latest Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) inspection a mere three months before confirming in December that a data breach compromised 40 million customers’ payment card numbers. Target also said it is fast-tracking its efforts to roll out chip card acceptance …