ALEXANDRIA, Va. – In 2014, alone, there were 783 recorded data breaches involving more than 80 million consumer records. What have we learned from these major breaches? The primary attack vector employed by hackers has changed to point-of-sale (POS) malware in response to merchants becoming more PCI DSS compliant. In the past, hackers attacked data at rest in merchant databases, networks and file systems by breaching a merchant’s network defense systems, or lack thereof. Now, hackers are focusing on exposing data in motion by inserting malware into the merchant’s POS that silently listens to the stream of clear-text card data flowing by and ships it out to the hacker’s servers.

While EMV can protect the card data from being used to duplicate a physical card, it does nothing to stop hackers from stealing the EMV card data as it travels through a merchant’s systems or networks. Hackers can still expose this data and sell it for use in card-not-present and online fraud. However, PCI-validated P2PE encrypts cardholder data at the Point of Interaction (POI) in a PCI-approved P2PE device and decryption is done off-site in an approved Hardware Security Module (HSM). PCI P2PE prevents clear-text cardholder data from being present in a merchant or enterprise’s system or network where it could be accessible in the event of a data breach, while providing a significant reduction in PCI cardholder data environment (CDE) scope.

To guide retailers through this complicated technology process, Conexxus is hosting a free webinar “PCI P2PE 2.0: What Does it Mean for Merchants and Processors?” on Thursday, September 10 at noon (EDT). Led by Ruston Miles, chief innovation officer and founder of Bluefin Payment Systems, the hour-long webinar will include discussion of:

• PCI P2PE Overview and Benefits
• A Comparison of P2PE v1.x and v2.0
• v2.0 Implications for Merchants
• v2.0 Implications for Processors
• Integration Model Overview

Register now for the webinar.