Secure Payment Processing

A lot of anti-fraud advice is directed at individual customers. We are warned to never share our card details, and to be wary of clicking a link on an email that purports to be ‘from the bank’. Those emails are frequently scams and phishing attempts that will take you to a clone website and try…

Every time there’s a ‘celebrity nudes leak’ or a newsworthy data breach, a lot of people get worried. The savvy / paranoid among us will immediately change passwords. Some quit the compromised platform. Unfortunately, these breaches sometimes happen in spaces we can’t do without. Most of us can’t – or won’t – quit our email,…

Picture this for a second. You go to the mall and buy something from your favorite store. It could be a burger, some shoes, or a new phone. When you get home, you find something wrong with your purchase. Who do you blame? Is it yourself for poor spending? Is it the mall for not…

New businesses generally operate on a shoestring. They don’t always have much capital to play with, and statistics suggest it may take time before they break even. Does this mean your new business can forego other business ‘essentials’ like PCI compliance for your virtual storefront? First, it helps to understand this structure. Payment Card Industry…

The word ‘hacker’ is a scary one. It conjures images of super-genius programmers breaking into your computer system, crashing it, and stealing all your money. In the movies, hackers frantically run their hands over keyboards and attack your system in seconds. In the real world, hacking is laborious and complex, and it takes far longer.…

As a merchant, you can accept credit card payments in different ways for goods and services supplied. There are two terms that you will hear bandied about, Card-Not-Present (CNP) and Card-Present (CP). Let’s understand what a Card-Not-Present or Card-Present transaction is: Card Not Present means that the merchant does not see the physical credit card…

Research shows that up to 30% of small business owners are unaware of PCI compliance. Worse still, these people don’t realize that non-compliance can potentially carry penalties. What is PCI compliance? PCI (or, technically, PCI DSS) stands for the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard. It refers to payment security standards that businesses use to…

Online shopping is catching on at an accelerating rate. Businesses were once worried customers wouldn’t buy things they couldn’t see, touch, or try on, but we now know that customers are willing to take that chance. Of course, businesses have helped move this trend along by offering sound refund policies, providing try-on photographic technology, and…

In the ‘real world’ it’s fairly easy – and painful – to discover that you’re dissatisfied with your security arrangements: your home gets robbed. It may mean you left a window open, a door unlocked, or the dog unfed (making that sedated chunk of beef the thief tossed over the fence look extremely tempting). In…