The compliance clock is ticking. It is estimated that more than 500,000 PIN entry devices (PEDs) that predate security certifications are in use in the U.S. market. These devices predate the Visa Inc. PED standard - now the Payment Card Industry (PCI) PED Standard - and were "never approved" by the card brands, which have mandated they must be removed from service by July 2010. Are you ready for that challenge and opportunity?

Liability landing

Criminals are increasingly targeting older, unsecure PIN pads and terminals as a relatively easy means to gain access to cardholder data. The liability for these attacks is being placed with greater frequency squarely at the feet of merchants and acquirers.

The 2009 Verizon Business Data Breach Investigations Report examined 98 confirmed data breaches that compromised almost 300 million consumer records. Of the organizations victimized, 81 percent were not PCI Data Security Standard compliant, according to Verizon Business.

PINs beguiling

While many of these breaches had nothing to do with PIN pad compromises, obtaining PINs by exploiting vulnerable elements of computer networks is now the primary game in town for a number of criminal organizations.

Offending breaches range from highly sophisticated computer networking assaults to crude efforts that might be equated to "smash and grab" attacks in which criminals simply replace an existing terminal with a device that appears identical but has been bugged.

For example, according to The News Journal of Delaware, two men pled guilty in February 2009 to using a skimmer at the counter of a Rite Aid Corp. store to scoop up account numbers and PINs and use them to make counterfeit cards, with which they stole more than $500,000 from bank accounts.

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