Press

NILES, MI (September 15, 2014) — 2014 has already seen a staggering amount of internal and external data breaches; with the most notable occurrences originating from external breaches of retailers’ points of sale, like those of Target, Neiman Marcus, P.F. Chang’s, SuperValu, and Goodwill. Now Home Depot is most likely going to be added to that list.These massive credit card breaches don’t look like they will be stopping or slowing down anytime soon. It is therefore pertinent that all credit unions remain proactive in adopting multiple layers of preventative security measures to help mitigate the risk of being exposed to these ever-increasing external cyber attacks.

If a credit union is in fact faced with having the payment cards of their members compromised due to a retailer data breach, it is also key the credit union members are educated about the available card security solutions the credit union has in place to protect their cardholders from exposure.

The 2014 Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report Executive Summary stated the following facts: “The costs of a data breach can be enormous. And it’s not just the remediation costs and potential fines; the damage to your reputation and loss of customer confidence could impact your success for years. Many companies never recover from a major data breach.”1

No matter if it’s an internal breach on a credit union’s system or an external breach of a retailer’s point of sale system, credit unions need to be aggressive about ensuring these types of cyber-attacks are contained and informing their members about their security solutions to keep their financial security and their reputation strong.

Here are a few of the key preventative steps a credit union should have in place to help prevent exposure to an external cyber attacks and to help keep cyber criminals from breaking into their systems internally:

• Each time an internal breach or large external card breach occurs, take steps to monitor which members’ may have affected and inform these members of the possibility of their being at risk.
• Provide educational resources to employees and members on how cyber attacks happen and what preventative steps can be taken to protect themselves from being exposed.
• Evaluate the layers of security in place on the credit union’s system(s) and associated vendors’ systems and decide if there are weaknesses in the systems that could use additional protection.
• Utilize a strong fraud monitoring system to flag all transactional risk exposures.
• As there is no one “silver bullet” cyber attack protection measure, implement multiple layers of security to reduce being exposed to these attacks.

¹ http://www.verizonenterprise.com/DBIR/2014/reports/rp_dbir-2014-executive-summary_en_xg.pdf