Creditnet News Story
Visa's anti-identity theft best practices earn praise
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
By Sam Lee
One industry leader in identity theft prevention has come forward to give Visa acclaim for its latest suggestions regarding consumer protection measures.
A leader in online credit card payment protection, 3Delta Systems, recently said that Visa's "global industry best practices" will be very helpful when it comes to protecting both consumers and businesses from hackers that would try to steal their credit card information.
The company said that Visa is now recommending an innovative "tokenization" system, which takes a customer's real 16-digit credit card number and converts it into a series of characters. The new tokens only mean something when processed by the company's cryptographic key, making them useless to hackers. Not only does this process reduce the threat of vulnerable information being stolen, it also reduces costs to comply with data security laws.
According to 3Delta Systems, Visa is an industry leader in advocating token generation, as well as pushing for improvements in the process companies use for associating those tokens with the original information, data storage, and generating new keys to scramble them.
Visa was recently targeted by hackers trying to gain access to their customers' credit card information with a virus called Zeus, but successfully repelled the attack and protected consumers' data.
