All Signs Point to Credit Cards’ Recovery   After getting KO’d in the recession, credit card usage is back on its feet. While card issuers are more cautious than they were a few years ago, consumers who have credit cards are using them more frequently, and they are spending …

Probably no pathway in electronic payments is more littered with the wreckage of failed processors than that of micropayments. But recent moves by publishers to charge for content is helping fuel renewed interest in the business of processing tiny transactions. Google Inc., for example, has developed a micropayments engine to help …

With much of the payments industry and Silicon Valley tech press in a speculative frenzy about what Google Inc., Apple Inc., and Facebook Inc. might or might not do regarding mobile payments, a new study has come along indicating that consumers are complacent, arguably extremely complacent, about protecting personal and …

Hackers continue to improve malware, third-party vendors continue to serve their clients poorly when it comes to data security, and the evidence points to Russia as the single biggest source of attacks on databases. Those are some of the highlights in the new Global Security Report 2011 from Trustwave Holdings …

Security Notes Detecting the Enemy Within Gideon Samid / Gideon@AGSgo.com In the overwhelming majority of cases, cyber-criminal activity is carried out, or at least involves, a trusted insider. But though most of our clients know this, they still don’t take action. The reason is obvious: Any hunt for that rotten …

Gemalto, a maker of payment cards, said on Wednesday it had developed the first credit card that can generate one-time passwords and also function in point-of-sale devices. The product, which the company calls the Ezio card, is immediately available in commercial quantities in the U.S., though so far no domestic …

CardinalCommerce Corp., a major player in the business of enabling alternative payments for merchants and processors, entered the nascent business of online PIN debit on Tuesday with a product it says requires little to no integration work by merchants, gateways, processors, or networks. The Mentor, Ohio-based company says it has …

Recognizing that sloppy payment-processing software installations can lead to data breaches, Visa Inc. on Tuesday issued what it calls the top 10 best practices for secure software management. Visa is aiming the guidance mostly at third-party software vendors, integrators, value-added resellers (VARs), and others that sell or license card-processing applications …

Supermarket chain Hannaford Bros. Inc. stunned the electronic-payments world when it revealed that it had passed its most recent audit for compliance with the Payment Card Industry data-security standard (PCI) before hackers breached its computer systems and compromised more than 4 million card numbers (Digital Transactions News, March 18, 2008). …

Six months after announcing it will process online PIN-debit transactions through PayPal Inc., the Star electronic funds transfer network has signed a number of member banks for the new service, with “implementations in progress,” says Julie Saville, vice president for product management at Star. Despite the tie-up with PayPal, however, …