What Tops Retailers’ Security Wish Lists this Holiday Season?
With an influx of online shoppers and supply chain disruptions causing fulfillment burdens this holiday season, the last thing retailers want to worry about is cyber threats. During the biggest retail season of the year, transactions are increasing, as are hackers, skimmers, and fraudsters. So, what tops retailers’ security wish lists?
Point-to-point encryption (P2PE). Why? P2PE encrypts cardholder data at the point of sale and eliminates it from ever entering the point-of-sale environment, keeping it safe from malware that might otherwise be spying on network traffic and capturing credit card numbers. However a shopper pays — in-person, online, or contactless — P2PE increases data security by protecting cardholder data in transit and at rest.
“P2PE and tokenization, when used together, can help eliminate clear-text customer data from being anywhere on the network. In this model, customer data remains encrypted throughout the entire payment process, thereby reducing its exposure. Data is encrypted at the initial point of capture using P2PE, decrypted within the secure boundary of a hardware security module (HSM) and re-encrypted using a transfer key for payment validation by the processor, while simultaneously having a token generated for storage and future use,” explains David Close, Futurex’s chief solutions architect in his article, Eliminate all clear-text cardholder data from your network, in The Green Sheet.
Securing Behind the Cash Register
It’s critical to keep cardholder information safe from malicious, unintended use. Our P2PE solutions help organizations encrypt, store, and transmit this sensitive data securely — and can even help meet PCI DSS control objectives and trim the scope of PCI audits. Now that is the gift that keeps on giving! Consider these benefits:
- Increases security for sensitive data
- Reduces the scope and cost of PCI DSS compliance
- Easily expandable functionality as your needs grow
- Supplies virtually limitless scalability
- Integrates easily into existing environments
- Role-based user permission system with enforced dual control
How it works: in a compliant point-to-point encryption environment, sensitive data is encrypted from the point of interaction and decrypted only within the secure boundary of a FIPS 140-2 Level 3 or PCI HSM-validated HSM. In a retail environment, P2PE begins when cardholder data encryption keys are injected into retail point of sale terminals, either directly or remotely. Cardholder data will then be automatically encrypted at the point of capture and can be decrypted once safely held within the compliant Futurex HSM. Learn more about point-to-point encryption.
HSMs During the Holidays and Beyond
When it comes to safeguarding customers’ most sensitive data, retailers and other financial services organizations — banks, credit unions, transaction processors, and acquirers — want to process and manage sensitive financial data at scale. It’s vital that your payment processing infrastructure combines world-class security with world-class performance, especially during the holiday shopping season.
The use of HSMs in transaction processing is critical, as payment HSMs provide the cryptographic functions needed to support end-to-end data security, including encryption and cryptography key management. As a long-time partner with the financial services industry, Futurex’s HSMs are used to handle security for billions of transactions per year, enabling safe and secure commerce around the world.
Transactions in the Cloud
Securing transactions in the cloud is trending. The migration of payment HSMs to the cloud is up because of scalability, cost benefits, and processes such as key management and P2PE are streamlined — all while meeting security and payment compliance requirements such as FIPS 140-2 validation, PCI DSS, PCI P2PE, and PCI PIN.
At Futurex, we work with the world’s largest retailers and banks to safeguard data with payment hardware security modules that make up the security backbone of the worldwide financial ecosystem, securing every transaction, every purchase, every gift. In fact, Fintech Finance Awards 2021 named Futurex’s VirtuCrypt Cloud Payment HSM a finalist in the “Invisible Security” category.
How can we check off your security wish list? Contact us today! Here’s to a happy and secure holiday season!
