Much attention and excitement within the security world has recently been focused on the lucrative surge in crypto-mining malware and hacks involving or targeting cryptocurrency implementations themselves.

Yet the volume of ‘real world’ transactions for tangible goods and services currently paid for with cryptocurrency is still relatively niche in comparison to those that are being paid for every minute of the day with the pieces of plastic we know as payment cards.

According to the British Retail Consortium, last year here in the UK card payments overtook cash for the first time ever. An upward trend assisted no doubt by the increasingly ubiquitous convenience of contactless micro payments.

No coincidence either perhaps that contactless related card fraud in the UK also overtook cheque-based fraud in the first half of 2017.

For the foreseeable future, card payment channels are likely to present a continued risk to both businesses and individuals for the exact same reason that bank robber Willie Hutton gave us in the last century for his chosen means of income. In today’s digital economy, however, agile cyber criminals will not only ‘go’ as Mr. Hutton suggested “where the money is” but will swiftly adapt and evolve their tactics to ‘go where the insecurity is.’ Hence, whilst according to a range of sources EMV chip cards have cut counterfeit fraud at ‘point of sale’ (POS) in the UK by approximately a third since the technology was introduced and similar improvements are now being cited for its more recent adoption in the US, a marked and plausibly corresponding uptake in online ‘card not present’ (CNP) fraud continues to rise.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS) has formally existed since 2004 to help reduce the risk of card fraud through the adoption and continued application of (Read more...)