Data security

Calls for less reliance on credit bureaus and Social Security numbers for verification are leading many to envision a future of identity on a distributed ledger.

The U.K. Financial Conduct Authority opened an investigation into the hack of credit reporting company Equifax Ltd. that saw personal data stolen from at least 143 million people.

The Clearing House has become one of the first Mastercard-certified, third-party token service providers on behalf of issuing banks.

KRACK, combined with other attacks, allows for the reading of pain text username, passwords, credit card numbers as well as the injection of code including ransomware, writes Timothy Crosby, senior security consultant for Spohn.

Equifax continues work to add new security features and restore full access to The Work Number following a report highlighting potential security vulnerabilities in a browser-based portal of its employment verification service.

The answer is to change the authentication framework altogether with new technologies that employ passive biometrics and behavioral analytics, writes Ryan Wilk, vice president of customer success at NuData Security.

The problem could be even worse this year, thanks to a new round of consumer data breaches, including the huge Equifax breach that exposed protected data on more than 145 million Americans, writes Rafael, executive vice president at ClearSale.

As incidents such as the Equifax breach create more urgency to move beyond static identifiers and authentication methods, Visa is getting aggressive about pushing dynamic tools to vet and shield identity.

The nonbinding guidance, which followed a nearly yearlong inquiry about industry practices, said consumers should have greater ability to obtain information about their financial data, among other principles.

Companies and households should therefore be on the lookout for security patches of their wireless access points and endpoint devices like laptops, desktops and mobile devices, write Steven Murdoch and Frederik Mennes from Vasco Data Security