Live data from Hacker News

How Visa Protects Your Data

fastcompany.com

1–10 of 21 posts

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#2
Meanwhile, outside their data centre, they do very little to ensure customer card security and enforce heavy-handed policies that put most of the risk on merchants and downstream processors.

--- obDisclosure: I am a merchant who has been defrauded hundreds of thousands of dollars and have no love for the credit card companies.

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#3
post #2

Meanwhile, outside their data centre, they do very little to ensure customer card security and enforce heavy-handed policies that put most of the risk on merchants and downstream processors. --- obDisclosure: I am a merchant who has been defrauded hundreds of thousands of dollars and have no love for the credit card companies.

Instead of ranting about it here, I thought it might be more appropriate to enumerate my primary concerns in a post to my blog - http://www.byte.org/2011/10/28/the-visa-shakedown/

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#4
"This is Visa's OCE, or Operations Center East, the biggest, newest, and most advanced of its U.S. data centers. It is a data-security heaven--and Visa's acknowledgment that hackers are increasingly savvy, that data is an ever-desirable black-market commodity, and that the best way to keep Visa (and its 150 million daily transactions) safe is to ensconce its network inside a heavily fortified castle that instantly responds to threats. The OCE's 130 workers have two jobs: Keep hackers out and keep the network up, no matter what. That's why rule No. 1 for visitors is: Never reveal its location. "On the eastern seaboard" is as specific as Visa will allow."

uhh, right. two articles from the 90s put it in mclean, va: http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19940101...

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19931218&...

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#5
post #4

"This is Visa's OCE, or Operations Center East, the biggest, newest, and most advanced of its U.S. data centers. It is a data-security heaven--and Visa's acknowledgment that hackers are increasingly savvy, that data is an ever-desirable black-market commodity, and that the best way to keep Visa (and its 150 million daily transactions) safe is to ensconce its network inside a heavily fortified castle that instantly re…

according to this profile, it may have move to herndon.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=59159289&authTyp...

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#6
the mantraps and hand scanners sound insane to I guess all normal people, but in my experience that is a pretty standard level of security. I have a few 1U servers co-located and I have to pass through multiple mantraps with palm readers to access them.

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#7
post #6

the mantraps and hand scanners sound insane to I guess all normal people, but in my experience that is a pretty standard level of security. I have a few 1U servers co-located and I have to pass through multiple mantraps with palm readers to access them.

Agreed. Was reading through their "measures" and pretty much everything is standard process/equipment for your typical medium to high end data center. Man traps, batteries, generators, water cooling, avoid corrosion (uhh duh).

The only things I think they have I haven't seen before:

1) The concrete barrier and hair pin turn. Most data centers don't fear James Bond.

2) The air lifted mailroom.

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#8
This really doesn't sound like Visa protecting my data. It sounds more like Visa having enough horsepower and backups so that they can keep their company continuously running.

Not that that's a bad thing, but I really don't believe they care about protecting our data. From personal experience, they seem to let any type of fraud occur on your credit card, and then if you protest, then they might reverse the charges. And then they issue you a new credit card number. They would prefer to fix the problem before, putting the onus on us to determine if fraud occurred, rather than actually prevent the fraud and protect our data.

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#9

This really doesn't sound like Visa protecting my data. It sounds more like Visa having enough horsepower and backups so that they can keep their company continuously running. Not that that's a bad thing, but I really don't believe they care about protecting our data. From personal experience, they seem to let any type of fraud occur on your credit card, and then if you protest, then they might reverse the charges. A…

Even when fraud occurs they are not interested in going after the source unless that dollar amounts are high enough. I know this from personal experience on an e-commerce site. We detected blatant fraud happening, and the banks/card companies/processors don't care because the scale is too small. (lots of ~$100 purchases on many, many credit cards all to the same two or 3 addresses)

Re: How Visa Protects Your Data

#10
That's cool. But after just returning from a month long road trip across USA (I'm from Slovenia), I'm simply baffled by the lack of security when I'm paying with my Visa card. In 97% of times I just swiped my card and the transaction was done. 1% of the time the cashier bothered to check my ID, 1% of the time I had to sign the check, and in 1% of the time I had to enter my PIN number. What the hell? I'm surprised any of you yanks still have any money left, considering how easy one can take all your money, if one comes into possession of your card.

Here you always have to at least sign the card (and the cashier checks the signature against the one on the card), but in most cases you have to enter your PIN number. And I live in fricking Slovenia who was, just 5 minutes ago, a part of a communist union ...

Anybody has an explanation for this lack of security in the states?

Post reply on HN