Every year, millions of dollars is compromised due to fraudulent transactions and cybercrimes happening across the globe. But don’t be panicked. With a few adjustments, you can be protected from the online payment scams and keep your business running.
1. Ensure PCI DSS compliance
By the year 2022, payment fraud caused by credit card scams will increase to be $34.6 Billion worldwide. This is the reason why PCI DSS compliance is this important. The vision of PCI DSS compliance is to decrease the fraud regarding credit cards and debit cards. 6 main goals of PCI DSS help make the vision come true –
- Cardholder’s data protection
- Regular networks’ monitoring & testing
- Vulnerability management program maintenance
- Information security policy maintenance
- Strict access control measures implementation
- Secure network and system maintenance
Next time when you choose a payment service provider for your online business, remember that PCI DSS compliance is a must. And don’t worry, most of the certified payment processors will have the official PCI DSS mark.
2. Use Two-factor authentication
If you have used any big online services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. recently, you already know about two-factor authentication. These are known as 2FA which allows to confirm or validate every login by sending an OTP (One Time Password) to their email or phone. This way, even if someone has the username and password other than the account owner, they won’t be able to login to your account.
Well, how can you utilize two-factor authentication you ask?
There are 2 ways you can utilize 2FA. First of all, you can use OTP to verify only you can log in to your account. You can send One Time Password on the user’s phone or email and allow a safe login situation with those passwords. But you can utilize other verification methods when they make a transaction. Most financial institutes use the security questions or Date of Birth to ensure the request is made by the user himself.
3. Encrypt your payment webpage
If you are caught up with the latest news, you already know Google declared websites without https as “not secured”. And for the online media, they have additional primary SSL certification like EssentialSSL, PositiveSSL or InstantSSL that ensure security. However, payment pages require much safer security assurance. Two major options are EV (Extended Validation) or OV (Organization Validation). They require an in-depth verification and can carry out a high-volume of transactions.
4. Tokenization
Tokenization is basically replacing the account number with a randomly generated number sequence. This sequence of numbers is called the token in this case. Since the cybercriminals can’t hack or access this unique sequence of numbers or the token, this is a very efficient way to secure payments. Most of the time, the primary 16-digit account number is replaced with an even bigger sequence of numbers. And since the stores use different tokens to store and protect the credit card data, there is no way for fraudsters to get a hold of the sensitive data.
