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Is Your Valuable Credit Card Information at Risk Right Now?

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October is Cyber Security awareness month , and I’ve been writing (read here, here, and here) that you must protect yourself from hackers and scammers. Today The Wall Street Journal published an article warning about the dangers of “no-card-present” online transactions that could drain your credit card balance. After a massive industry undertaking to secure point of sale transactions with chip enabled credit cards, hackers have moved to the one place where there are still no chip readers, the internet.

Robin Sidel writes for the Journal:

As a result, online merchants and the card industry are scrambling to create products and procedures that can quickly identify fraudulent transactions when an unseen customer taps card information into a computer or mobile device. “In card-not-present transactions, there are so many different kinds of merchants and the fraud manifests in so many different ways that there really isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Julie Conroy, an analyst at Aite.

Among other solutions, the card industry is touting technology called tokenization. This replaces cardholder information such as account numbers and expiration dates with a unique series of numbers that validates the customer’s identity. That way, hackers can’t steal actual card data if a merchant’s payment system is breached.

And Tuesday, the industry introduced new standards for card issuers to put technology in place that will accept additional data from merchants who want to authenticate transactions. The move will allow merchants to send information such as the customer email address, billing and shipping details to the banks as additional tools to verify that the purchase is authentic.

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E.J. Smith

Editor-in-Chief
E.J. Smith is Founder of YourSurvivalGuy.com, Managing Director at Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd., a Managing Editor of Richardcyoung.com, and Editor-in-Chief of Youngresearch.com. E.J. graduated from Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with a B.S. in finance and investments. In 1995, E.J. began his investment career at Fidelity Investments in Boston before joining Richard C. Young & Co., Ltd. in 1998. E.J. has trained at Sig Sauer Academy in Epping, NH. His first drum set was a 5-piece Slingerland with Zilldjians. He grew-up worshiping Neil Peart of the band Rush, and loves the song Tom Sawyer—the name of his family’s boat, a Grady-White Canyon 306. He grew up in Mattapoisett, MA, an idyllic small town on the water near Cape Cod. He spends time in Newport, RI and Bartlett, NH—both as far away from Wall Street as one could mentally get. The Newport office is on a quiet, tree lined street not far from the harbor and the log cabin in Bartlett, NH, the “Live Free or Die” state, sits on the edge of the White Mountain National Forest. He enjoys spending time in Key West and Paris. Please get in touch with E.J. at ejsmith@youngresearch.com.