Technical Glitch – What’s Your Backup Plan for Processing Payments?

• September 14th, 2016
• By Cheryl Reinertsen

A WorldPay Technical Glitch lasted weeks, as reported in this article. What should businesses do? What would you do if that happened to your payment processor – at Christmas time?

You implemented appropriate security checks in your checkout process. So you have nothing to worry about when it comes to security, right? Maybe…

Do you have an Incident Response Plan? This is essential to detect and deter threats. It includes training, strong passwords, testing, planning, and securing your data. According to a report by Trustwave, this short list of things to include in your response plan can help contain a security breach from weeks to one day:

• Train your staff on the best security practices.
• Enforce passphrases or strong passwords (minimum of seven characters and combination of upper/lower case letters, symbols, and numbers). Also use two-factor authentication when accessing the network. Many compromises are caused by weak passwords.
• Secure your data. Test and scan to identify and fix flaws early.
• Use penetration testing on your system to identify vulnerabilities and understand how your data can be attacked.
• Plan your response to a breach and practice the Plan.

Customer trust is also a big deal. Customers don’t want to think about security – they want you to. And if you’re not easy to contact, they may go elsewhere. Make sure your customers can reach you immediately with any questions. Display your phone number where it can be easily and quickly seen. If a shopper has a question or problem navigating your site, make sure you can help.

It can be complicated for any business to keep up with all the cyber attacks and payment fraud going on around us, but you must be vigilant. Keep up with your PCI DSS requirements, have a security process and an incident response plan, and train your employees on them. A good ERP system can help with features such as fraud scoring, and it will support your PCI DSS efforts to keep your sensitive data safe.