Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hey guys, and welcome back to the SecurityQ, your source for business data
security.
Today on the SecurityQ, I wanna talk about Black Friday
and Cyber Monday. So I have a question for you. You increase your employees to
maximize holiday sales,
but what about security?
Holiday shopping, although frustrating for both consumers
and businesses, does allow for both the benefit.
Amazing deals for shoppers and increased revenue for businesses.
In fact, approximately 48 percent of
retail sales occur during November and December. This year,
sales are expected to reach $586.1 billion
with online sales accounting for over 90 billion dollars.
As holiday sales increase,
we expect hackers are gonna double their efforts and so should you.
I recently interviewed Gary Glover, a payment card industry security expert,
about what merchants could do to secure their business during the holiday season.
Here's what he had to say. Gary, during this very busy holiday season,
what can merchants do to better secure themselves? That's a great
question Brandon.
I think the biggest temptations that merchants will have during the season is
to cut corners.
It's so busy, you want to keep your stores online, you want to make
sure that you're getting
POS systems available to people,
and you practiced in and been really great with security all during the year, and
sometimes we
have the tendency to forget those just keep things going.
Just like any kind of situation where thieves may be involved, they're
looking for distractions.
The holiday season is a great situation where distractions are
generated and
can be exploited. What are some things that merchants can do to secure themselves
and their physical location?
POS terminals, the things that take the card swipes,
are often targets of thieves, and criminals, and they will want to
replace it with something that they have doctored to
skim card data out. It's really important in lanes that may not be used
or
aren't surrounded by a lot of people
make sure physically that those units are hard to either get out
or remove
or that you're watching them or
maybe even checking the serial numbers every morning before you start up
operations to make sure that those are the ones that you know
are real,
not one that a criminal has replaced with one that will be
skimming that card data that they can use later on.
Another thing to watch for. There's a temptation when you
move things around the store. Maybe you're going to
add a new wireless segment
or move out by the Christmas tree area or something.
Make sure that your not cutting corners on setting that wireless up. Follow all
the PCI guidelines, WPA, WPA2.
Use strong passwords. Don't use Christmas tree as the password.
And make sure
that even if you're using a a wired connection, you're not connecting it to a
network segment in the store
that isn't your POS network. It's an office segment
and can get to the Internet and there's less controls on the segment.
Make sure
your watching for those types of physical layout situations.
The last thing. In a busy parking lot, is pretty easy for a
hacker to sit in his car and try hacking wireless networks that you may
have exposed.
Have the guys that are picking up your carts or whatever, to
watch for people just sitting there with a computer in the car, and ask them to leave
Those are just a few things you can do. We just heard some excellent
guidance from Gary Glover about what you can do to secure your physical location
and your website during this busy holiday season. Our advice?
Don't make last-minute changes to your processes and make sure that your
employees are properly trained
and systems are up to date. Remember you can never be too cautious during the
holiday season.
Well guys, that's all the time we have today on the SecurityQ, but as always
we like to hear from you. So post your questions in the comments below
and don't forget to subscribe. See you next time, on the SecurityQ.