“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” we wrote as 2016 became 2017, citing a Guardian article that had proclaimed our previous year…
Now That Future’s Passed: A Look Back at 2017 (updated)

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” we wrote as 2016 became 2017, citing a Guardian article that had proclaimed our previous year…
Unfortunately, we have more “breaching” to report this week: As Reuters reports, “hundreds of millions of hacked user names and passwords for email accounts…
Is your business feeling the holiday pressure yet? As much as we all look forward to this joyful time of year, we also face the stress that comes with it.
We are at a kind of “nexus” in the world of payments already — between the old and the new, the secure and the not-so-secure, the wired and the wireless. So it may well be fitting…
In our current climate of “hackery” and security breaches, the number of alerts and advisories going to out to companies like ours is on the increase. Many of these have valuable information that we feel should be passed along to our customers, so they can use these ideas, deploy them, to keep their own transactions — and their customers — as safe as possible.
Plastic and digits are used in lieu of cash everywhere, but the food biz continues to find itself one of the most heavily “charged” industries, since everyone — whether it’s a fast food fish filet, sit-down bone-in ribeye, a morning tofu scramble, or anything else — has to eat.
As an astute reader of this space, you have, of course, been following all the news and fallout emanating from the Target data breach, affecting upwards of 110 million customers (and of course numerous banks and credit unions who suddenly had to reissue cards, cover fraudulent charges, etc.)
The wake of the biggest data breach in U.S. history continues with its fallout, including the news from targeted Target that the hackers originally were able to pilfer their way into the discount chain’s system by “using electronic credentials stolen from a vendor,” according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.
The news of course, in the wake of the most infamous consumer data breach yet, just gets newsier. Some reports indicate that information going back as far as ten years, on Target customers, could have been pilfered in the breach. One couple near the U.S. / Mexican border was arrested after having a cache of false credit cards in their possession, made from what appears to be a fraction of the stolen data.