Target breach is bad news for the industry

Once again we are sadly reminded of the vulnerability of businesses to data breaches, and we are left with 40 million customers fearing that their credit cards will be hijacked by fraudsters just in time for Christmas.

There has been a consistent rise in cyber-crime in the past few years, and traditional security solutions have proven to be inadequate to prevent this. So much so that it has become inevitable that, on occasion, card details will be stolen from businesses.

Whilst it is a difficult task indeed to prevent the theft of customer data, and we can expect to see instances such as these increase in 2014, the solution lies in real-time detection and prevention of the mis-use of such data to perpetrate fraud. The solutions exist to achieve this through low/no friction, real-time, context aware, multi-layered authentication models, which for the most part are totally invisible and intuitive.

This latest crime underlines once more the need for efficient, real-time, context-aware authentication and verification systems, but the security industry can only do so much. It remains the responsibility of financial institutions to implement these up-to-date systems and to protect their customers from future Christmases overshadowed by the fear of identity theft and payment card fraud.