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Trying To Protect Payment Data When You Can’t Even Find It All

Written by Evan Schuman
November 26th, 2008
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The IT struggle with knowing where all payment data is—let alone trying to enforce rules that pretty much try and keep it there—was the topic of a StorefrontBacktalk podcast this week with our own PCI columnist, David Taylor, and security specialist J.D. Oder, the chief technology officer at Shift4.

Oder said most payment data security problems start with an employee error. These are typically employees who truly thought they were doing everything right, but they were undercut by a failed corporate infrastructure. Taylor’s approach was more basic: Retailers must put much less payment data into the hands of employees and return to a centralized approach, as painful as it will be and as backward as it will feel. To listen to these folks argue it out, please click here.


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Kill All The Passwords

This article does mention, but does not give enough attention to, the fact that the attacks discussed are only feasible when the encrypted password file can be copied and subjected to an offline attack. The trick is to have authentication performed on a separate, much more strongly secured host - such as an Active Directory Domain Controller, or a Kerberos server, or a NIS+ server, or even using something as banal as an LDAP-over-SSL authentication dialog. In these environments, the odds of the "password file" being stolen and subjected to an offline attack go to near zero, and only online attacks may be carried out by the attacker. With sensible exponential backoff between failed password attempts, lockout after a modest number of failed attempts on a single account, and pattern detection, that minimum 7 character password is quite secure enough. Passwords aren't dead yet for security purposes, and they will be with us for a very long while to come for practical purposes. The trick is to employ them correctly. Read more...
The possibilities you describe are years away from being implemented at best, so for the moment passwords are an ugly reality. Luckily, password managers can easily manage hundreds of passwords of any length. The only thing a user needs to remember is the master password. It seems like an easier task to educate users on how to use password managers rather than implement complex security technology on a global basis. Read more...