With the card
payment infrastructure coming under attack recently, it is
important to understand what really happened – as opposed to what
was reported in the press.
By fully understanding the threat
and its impact, we can ensure that lessons are learnt for dealing
with such attacks when they seek to target the services provided to
merchants and cardholders again, as they inevitably will.
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The real impact of these attacks,
as revealed in the sheer volume of headlines and column inches, has
been the emphasis on how important the card payments system is to
our everyday lives.
In reality, any impact on the cards
and payments infrastructure and processing of transactions has been
so slight that they only registered in terms of annoyance and minor
inconvenience.
That’s not to dismiss the effect
that any delay might have on cardholders who expect instant access
and speedy payment processing. Any impact of this type, however
minor, is something that everyone involved in providing a safe and
reliable card payment processing service strives every day to
eliminate.
In these recent attacks, the
integrity of the card payments system was never in jeopardy and at
no time were cardholders unable to process safe/secure
transactions.
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By GlobalDataThe higher than normal traffic
caused by the botnets would have caused sites to operate more
slowly and might have created the impression that services were
unavailable, particularly the ‘3D-secure’ service of the payment
schemes.
This service offers
additional/enhanced security to e-commerce merchants via a pop-up
window that appears as the final step in the payment process where
cardholders are asked to enter a unique, personal code that has
been registered with their card issuer.
Some payment service providers did
suggest that this service could be disabled to allow faster
processing of transactions.
It has been reported the card
schemes’ systems were breached. This did not happen and no money or
cardholder data was at risk.
These attacks have provided a
real-world test of the card schemes’ and payment processors’
systems and the response has demonstrated that the cards and
payments industry was well prepared.
Such attacks are not new and
service providers now expect this sort of attack having seen
several in recent years.
This has led them to design and
roll out comprehensive anti-fraud, data security and system
integrity standards which has resulted in more resilient systems
for retailers/merchants to ensure that the consumer/cardholder is
protected.
These attacks should be viewed by
the authorities as serious acts of cyber-terrorism since the cards
payments system is a vital part of our national economic
infrastructure.
Any individual or group who
participates in botnet attacks is almost certainly engaging in
illegal activity; it goes way beyond registering a protest or
engaging in a schoolboy prank.
Paul Rodgers is chairman of
Vendorcom
