In June, more than 40 million Visa and Mastercard accounts were exposed to potential fraud when a security breach occurred at a third-party processor of payment card transactions. The breach, which took place at the Tucson office of CardSystems Solutions, was the latest in a slew of reports of customer account information being leaked or stolen using a variety of ‘transport’ methods. Not only are these methods numerous, but they are quick – due to today’s terabyte culture, a large bank’s customer account database can be duplicated in a matter of seconds.
In all kinds of organisations, including banks, USB mass storage devices have replaced the floppy disk, which used to be able to carry about only a megabyte of information. Storage devices, such as flash drives, Ipods and other MP3 players can store anything from 16 megabytes to 60 gigabytes (hard drive-based Ipods) of information.
