Uber Account Security Needs a Lift — and Other Trends in Payments

No sooner do we finish arranging a morning Uber ride for our son, than we sit down to sift through the week’s financial news — always redacted and highlighted here for your edification — to find that “stolen Uber accounts (are) worth more than stolen credit cards,” according to a CNBC Report.

Why? “It seems that ‘cybercriminals’ don’t care that much about your credit card number anymore. Uber,  PayPal and even Netflix accounts have become much more valuable to criminals, as evidenced by the price these stolen identifiers now fetch on the so-called ‘deep Web,’” according to security company Trend Micro, along with “any information that can be used to commit identity fraud, like Social Security numbers or date of birth and varies in price depending on the specific information for sale.”

Stolen credit card and debit card info now sells for less on the black market, in part because of successful countermeasures undertaken by payment processors like AVPS, and businesses like yours: “The reason why credit cards are worth less to crooks at this point is because banks and credit card issuers have developed more sophisticated fraud detection systems, rending stolen cards worthless very quickly,” the article states.

Despite this, according to the IT security  industry’s SC Magazine, “payment card data attacks worry over half of UK and US businesses.”

The figures, according to a survey by English telecom company Semafone, show that “well over half (60 percent) of US and 52 percent of UK enterprises feel that an attack on payment card data is likely or more than likely.”

This coming after a year in which “EMV cards were rolled out on a major scale, making transactions more secure, but leaving merchants, cardholders and issuers to keep up with the October 1st liability deadline,” as synopsized in a payments article on HuffingtonPost.

That HuffPost article provides a January overview of what 2016 might hold for payments. Among the its predictions about new, and presumably even more secure, types of payments coming online, will be “Selfie Pay,” which uses facial recognition features, along with a rise in more mobile banking and mobile payment features.

In spite of this, or in some cases, because of it, information is still being routinely hacked — anything that can “be used to build a fuller picture of a victim for identity theft,as CNBC says.

Traditionally, that information came from the account numbers, PINs, and more used in card transactions. Increasingly, it may come from pilfering medical records, or even your Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, PayPal, or numerous other accounts.

We will keep working throughout this still-new year to protect all the data and transactions you’ve entrusted us with. And you can contact your AVPS Rep with any questions you may have, or about any upgrades you may need.

You can even arrange, of course, to come meet with us in person! Just make sure it’s really you riding in the back of that Uber!

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