By Dion Chang and Raleen Bagg
R – Retail and Marketing
More cyber crime in store for retailers.
The failure of the retail sector to manage and secure the complex technology underlying their business is resulting in unprecedented cyber crime attacks. The magnetic stripe that passes though checkouts is where cyber criminals glean personal and financial data. Moving on from politics i.e. cyber jihad, banking and telecommunication, this new wave of cyber crime finds its way through patches in firewalls, USB drives and, a surprising weak link -inept suppliers’ passwords. Everyone with a security pass, a password or a vendor account is a weak point. When retail giant Target was attacked in 2014, the criminals are thought to have used the password of a vendor to access Target’s network. They then installed malware on the cashier stations to steal credit card details and send them to servers in Russia. It took Target two weeks to eradicate the malware. By then 40m credit card numbers had been stolen.
The most expensive types of e-crime for retailers are personal identification-related frauds, such as account takeovers, followed by card fraud, refund fraud and electronic “phishing” for private information. The theft of personal data, specifically card data, is the number one target as it can easily be monetised; unlike the theft of intellectual property.
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Image credit: Colin
