(7 May 2008 – Australia) A report has been released which has shown that small businesses are being targeted by credit card fraudsters because of vulnerabilities at point of sale.The report by Trustwave, a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) assessor, has shown that the point-of-sale check-out systems of small retailers are the primary target of thieves.
A total of 14 countries where tracked in this report, which covers January 2006 to December 2007.
Robert J. McCullen, chairman and CEO of Trustwave said that the experience has been consistent over the past three years in that smaller merchants make up the majority of businesses that are compromised.
He said that the smaller businesses were primary targets because larger ecommerce companies typically are more sophisticated and have better tools and more software in place.
McCullen said that vulnerable systems at small retailers can give an attacker access to the back-end systems of the company that processes their credit cards as well as the private network of a parent company.
With more than half of the compromises that Trustwave investigated occurring in the food service industry, this segment is particularly vulnerable to attacks, McCullen added.
A total of 92 percent of the 350 payment card compromises were experienced by companies in the low bracket of fewer than 20,000 ecommerce transactions or fewer than one million transactions overall regardless of channel (online, phone or storefront) in which the transactions are processed.