Cyber Monday concerns on the popularity of mobile payment solutions
According to reports British workers will spend 96 million hours buying Christmas presents online while at work this December, with £650m being spent (dubbed Cyber Monday) alone. Looking at how these transactions will be completed, PayPal has said that the global mobile payment volume increased 47% this Thanksgiving, compared from last year.
Jeffrey Man, PCI expert at Tenable Network Security, said: “There are high expectations not only for record breaking retail revenues but also increased use of mobile payment solutions by consumers making Christmas purchases – both online and at retail locations. The endorsement of mobile technologies by many industry leaders would lead most to believe that these solutions are secure and have been validated by the applicable Payment Card Industry (PCI) or Payment Application (PA) Data Security Standards. The PCI Council has not released any kind of standard with regard to mobile payment systems. One of the Council’s concerns is that, because the technology is evolving so quickly, any standard that they produce could be obsolete before it was ever released.
“So are the new payment technologies any more secure than older technologies? The fact is that they are generally less secure. New technologies are often rushed to production because of market forces and very often are not submitted to thorough security testing prior to release. Once hackers (good and bad) start to focus their attention on the new technologies, vulnerabilities are discovered. Often the vulnerabilities are not even directly associated with the technology itself but with the implementation of the technology. This is a very common method of exploitation, and new technologies are just as susceptible to this misuse and misapplication.”
