Safe and secure payment processing should be a primary concern for any merchant. No matter which
credit card processing services credit card processing services provider is used, threats to consumer data security remain. Implementing credit and debit card security is hardly a simple matter, especially for small merchants that may lack the necessary IT security budget and computer savvy. Though these merchants with the fewest credit card transactions per year are at the highest risk of security compromise, there are several steps that they and all merchants that use credit and debit card processing services in Canada can take to protect themselves and their customers.
Two important steps are to devote significant attention complying with the Payment Card Industry Security Standard (PCI DSS) and to pay similar attention to credit card company’s security regulations. These two sets of standards represent the combined effort and investment of the industry’s top minds collaborating with information security efforts, and are broken down very specifically based on the specific types of credit card processing services used, data storage style, merchant size, and other details.
Both the PCI DSS website and each credit card company lays out explicit and extended guidelines for every aspect of data security, and the PCI DSS offers instructional manuals for how to achieve compliance. Following these guidelines closely puts the industry’s best-practices into effect and is something that all merchants should do, even if it requires some extra investment to understand and implement the required measures. Failure to comply carries a significant fine, as well as increasing the risk of data compromise.
The other important step is to train employees about secure credit card processing behavior. This is actually pretty simple but absolutely essential because so many security breaches occur at the point of sale. Employees should know how to ensure that the machinery involved in providing credit card processing services has not been tampered with. Employees should only be given access to the backbone of a credit card processing system in rare cases.
By keeping employees vigilant for signs of credit card fraud and following PCI DSS practices from beginning to end, merchants can significantly decrease the odds that their customers’ data will be compromised.