YIKES: Most businesses don’t bother to encrypt credit cards
File this under “things that scare us.” The good people over at SecurityMetrics have just released a study finding that over 63% of businesses aren’t encrypting the credit cards they process. Additionally, 7% store that unencrypted magnetic stripe data. Magnetic stripe cards are incredibly easy to replicate and are always in demand on the black market. After the Target breach, “card shops” were totally overloaded with credit card dupes less than a week later. SecurityMetric’s tool PANscan uncovered the unecrypted cards and found the following: 
We needn’t remind you that no one is immune to data breaches, but you can have control over how much information an intruder can access. Encryption is an important step, but many are now pushing for tokenization to be the new standard, particularly in the retail sector.
