Ride the Lightning

Payment Card Security Abysmal: President Signs Executive Order

October 21, 2014

Hoping to spur enhanced credit/debit card security in the private sector, President Obama signed an Executive Order on October 17th compelling the government to lead the way by securing payment cards through microchips and PINs.

Under the BuySecure initiative, the federal government will secure payments using chip and PIN technology for government credit and debit cards. Retail payment cards terminals at federal agencies will be upgraded to accept the new technology.

The Order encouraged private sector companies to join in the effort to enhance security. In light of recent massive retail breaches, more companies are seeing the wisdom of the technology which is already in widespread use in Europe.

We have been embarrassingly slow in adopting this much-needed technology but apparently we needed to reach a critical mass of having over 100 million Americans falling victim to data breaches in the past year.

Better late than never, but we sure are darn late to the party.

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