Outsmart Hospitality Hackers

It's official; 2009 was the year of data breaches in hospitality. In a multi-industry comparison report by Trustwave (www.trustwave.com), hackers infiltrated hospitality organizations more than any other industry last year, including retail, finance and more. According to the 2010 Global Security Report, hospitality breaches accounted for a whopping 38% of all breaches investigated by TrustWave SpiderLabs, and can be attributed to attacks on the systems responsible for the processing or transmission of payment card data.

The report identified software-based point of sale systems (POS) as the most frequently breached area across all of the industries involved (85%), because they represent the easiest method for criminals to obtain credit card data. For some companies in last year's industry-wide blitz, insecure network connections granted hackers unrestrained network access across properties, turning a single breach into a multi-site attack.

An operator's first line of defense against a data security breach is of course compliance with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS). Here are just a few solutions from the vendor community that can help:

Transaction management

Radiant Systems, Inc. (www.radiantsystems.com) is offering a new suite of payment security products known as Radiant Payment Guard; the suite currently includes Payment Guard MSR, Token Replacement and CPGateway. Payment Guard MSR is an encrypted magnetic strip reader that is installed within Radiant POS hardware terminals. By the end of 2010, Radiant will be shipping all POS terminals with Payment Guard MSR, with most terminals shipping with this security feature by July 1. Token Replacement, which is a security feature of the Aloha POS, assigns a unique identifier to cardholder data at the RBS WorldPay and Radiant Payment Services host to prevent personal information from being stored on the POS. Finally, the CPGateway service works with Radiant's retail product, CounterPoint, to encrypt cardholder data from the store to the hosting center.