Frost and Sullivan White Paper: Card Data Security in an IP World

Reliable broadband connections, either wired or wireless, offer significant advantages over legacy technologies e.g. dial-up or leased line, including always-on connectivity, faster
transaction speeds and lower costs of support. IP connectivity also removes the need for
separate telecommunication lines such as phone lines or ISDN.

The Internet Protocol or simply referred to as IP, is also a great enabler for multi applications, such as loyalty and pre-paid/gift cards, making it very simple to reach different hosts for different applications. In mature retailing markets, tier two and even tier three merchants are moving to adopt IP-based technology for Point-Of-Sale payments.

While a shift to IP based payment systems (from legacy systems) offers many advantages to businesses, it also presents a much more advantageous environment for cybercriminals to operate as the protocols are easily understood; they can easily remain anonymous on public IP networks, and maintain hundreds or thousands of simultaneous connections for malicious purposes such as Denial of Service, which can make payment networks unavailable for processing transactions.

In response to this, some organizations have opted for secure managed “Private” IP networks versus using “Public” or Internet facing networks. However, depending upon a provider’s implementation of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) technology, these networks cannot always be deemed as “Private” and, as such, have different considerations as far as security and compliance.

Against this background, Frost & Sullivan research indicates that:

• Fraud and other risks associated with internet or IP-based crime continue to grow and pose a major challenge to both merchants and their bank acquirers;

• A combination of compliance and utilization of enhanced security techniques are among practices that can help to protect organizations from card fraud;

• Secure outsourcing of payments networking is an effective means to deal with the increasing threat of card fraud and the mounting burden of compliance.