Creditnet News Story

Visa's anti-identity theft measures earn praise

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

By Thomas Astery

One industry leader in identity theft has come forward to give Visa acclaim for its latest consumer protection measures.

A leader in online credit card payment protection, 3Delta Systems, recently said that Visa has "global industry best practices" 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 using 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 cardholder information being stolen, it also reduces Visa's costs in complying with data security laws.

According to 3Delta Systems, Visa is an industry leader not only in token generation, but also the process it uses 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.

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