Payment Security

Electronic payments security is one of the biggest conversations in the industry. With technology evolving on a regular basis, it is important for businesses to make sure their payment solutions are secure. The economic impact of a data breach can be enormous and could potentially reach millions of dollars in financial losses, threatening even large merchants with the prospect of bankruptcy.

Sensitive cardholder information is vulnerable while in-flight and at rest. Without a multi-layered security strategy, a merchant could be exposing critical customer information that, if hacked, could result in the huge costs. However, there are security solutions that merchants of all sizes should consider to protect their business:

payment security
  • Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE): A P2PE solution protects card data during transmission, from the point of entry at the merchant’s POS terminal, until the decryption point. By using this technology, credit card data is rendered unreadable until it reaches the holder of the encryption keys, which makes it useless if cyber criminals steal the data. One of the methods used to implement a P2PE solution, is remote key injection (RKI) which is an easy way to remotely inject encryption keys in the POS terminal. With an RKI the payment terminals never have to leave their non-secure locations, decreasing downtime and the risk of fraud.
  • Tokenization: Tokenization protects the card data at rest by replacing it with a secure, substituted token. These tokens are kept in a secure “vault” and require keys to access the sensitive information, making the tokenized data useless to cyber criminals.