PCI compliance fails to prevent Hannaford hacking

The Hannaford card security breach is a worrying development for the payment card industry. The exploit - which would appear to be an inside job - exposes weaknesses in the PCI compliance standards explicitly and expensively promoted by the card companies as a solution to restoring consumer confidence in payment card security.

Unlike TJX, Hannaford did not store customer names and account information in a central location and was fully-compliant with industry standards for protecting card data. In this incident, the hackers tapped into the data as it was transmitted from servers at each compromised Hannaford outlet during the card verification process.

It may be that there is little the industry as a whole can do to thwart such a determined and sophisticated attack. Nonetheless, incidents such as this do little to inspire confidence in either retailer security, or the 12-step PCI standards.