Fergie's Tech Blog

Credit card companies now turn to security

A New York Times article by Eric Dash, via The International Herald Tribune, reports that:

Inside Visa's operations center is a cool, white room about the size of a football field. There, more than one thousand giant computers, set up like hulking linemen, process cardholder information from across the United States.

The computers hum with some 3,000 credit and debit card transactions swiped through its network every second; they will handle more than 35 billion transactions in the next year.

Visa is so protective of its data center that visitors are only allowed to say that it is located in the central region of the United States. All the secrecy and cutting-edge technology were set up to protect Visa's basic business interests - encouraging credit card purchases and shielding banks from losses to fraud.

Nearly two months after the disclosure that a tiny payment processor, CardSystems Solutions, exposed the personal information of more than 40 million cardholders, the system remains vulnerable. Only now, with their brands at stake, have Visa, MasterCard and the other major card companies begun to focus on their consumers' main interests - ensuring that personal information is secure at all times.

posted by Fergie @ 8/25/2005 05:46:00 PM