Credit Card Makers Forced to Scrutinize Security

By Eric Dash, The New York Times

Inside Visa’s operations center is a cool, white room about the size of a football field. There, more than a thousand giant computers, set up like hulking linemen, process cardholder information from across the United States.

The servers hum with some 3,000 credit and debit card transactions swiped through its network every second; they will handle more than 35 billion transactions in the next year.

Visa International is so protective of its American data center that visitors are allowed to say of the location only that it is somewhere in the central region of the United States. All the secrecy and cutting-edge technologies were set up to protect Visa’s basic business interests: encouraging credit card purchases and shielding banks from losses resulting from fraud.

As a result, nearly two months after the disclosure that a tiny payment processor, CardSystems Solutions, exposed the personal information of more than 40 million cardholders—and even though Visa subsequently banned CardSystems from connecting to its operation – the system remains as vulnerable as ever. Only now, with their brands at stake, have Visa, MasterCard and the other major card companies begun to focus on their consumers’ main interest: ensuring that personal information is secure at all times.

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