Credit Cards And Your Business – How To Keep Them Both Safe

It doesn’t matter if you have an online business or an offline business these days, at some point you are going to have to deal with the internet. In the past there was very little technology present when opening a business. You would order a product from a distributor, he would then ship it to you, you would mark up the price a bit to cover your cost and then you would sell it to the people that lived around your business. It was a fairly simple process and your business was able to survive based on the fact whether people needed your product or not. Now with the digital economy things can be a little more complicated.



Like we said in the first sentence in this article, it does not matter if your business is based online or it is based offline you are going to have to deal with the internet now. You will have to deal with it when it comes to promotion and you will have to deal with it when it comes to keeping in contact with your customer. But the most important way you are going to have to deal with it is when it comes to taking credit card payments from your customers.
Yes when you take credit card payments from your customers you are dealing with the internet as well. That is because this line is able to verify the credit card number and make sure they are able to make the payment. Once the number is verified then you are given the go ahead to allow the purchase to go through. It is a fairly simple transaction and one that allows both you and the customer to operate more smoothly in their day to day purchases. But there have always been holes found in this type of operation. Some have been patched and some have not been patched.
In the past some of the holes found were people able to camp outside of the store and do a man in the middle attack on the credit card machines. The credit card machines were wireless so they would just sit outside the store, store the numbers that went over the air and then sell them to other people later on. For a lot of these scammers it was an easy operation that allowed them to make millions of dollars.
Another scam, and it was made famous in several hacking books, was to hack the machines at older stores. Instead of deleting the credit card information nightly when they no longer needed it, the stores had older machines that would store the numbers for a certain amount of time and then the machines would delete the numbers. One black hat hacker was able to figure this out and they hacked the machines that were storing these numbers. They were able to live a big time lifestyle with these credit card numbers for a long time. It finally caught up to them but it took a long time for that to happen.
While the credit card machines that you use these days are probably safer than the ones in the past, you have to remember that they are not 100% safe. There are security holes found all of the time and there are hackers around who will try to take advantage of them. That is why you must always keep them updated. If you do not, then you put your business and your customer’s information at risk from cyber stalkers that may live halfway around the world.