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Feature: Selling Security |
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Seven years ago, ISOs could go about business the way they always had: “They sold fairly simple point-of-sale (POS) terminal programs to vendors, and that’s about all there was to it,” says Cliff Gray, an associate with The Strawhecker Group, an Omaha-based consulting firm that targets the payments industry. “Sponsor banks or processors—whomever the ISO had a relationship with—provided support for the terminal and the application running on it,” he adds.
Data security was simpler, too. Terminals communicated over what were relatively closed networks that revolved around the telephone line.
“As soon as we started pushing transactions over the open Internet, all kinds of schemes, scanning software, Trojan horses, and other mechanisms arrived on the scene to exploit the vulnerabilities of POS systems and capture and steal card data,” says Steve Mathison, vice president of POS terminal and hardware solutions for First Data in Greenwood Village, Colorado.
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