Will Apple’s NFC Payment Tech Accelerate Contactless Payment Adoption?

This is the first article in a multi-part series on Social Media Basics.  While this series focuses primarily on MobileBytes Point of Sale for restaurants, there are still some great practices and concepts that you could easily apply to other systems and retail operations.  With that being said, let’s talk about Loyalty Programs.

The holidays are fast approaching, and your customers will be looking for gift cards to give to their family and friends – do you have enough to meet their demand? Typical turn around times takes around 2-4 weeks from time of order, but the closer it gets to the holidays, these lead times can double.

Over the next several months, we will be sharing the PCI Council's advice on How to Protect Your Business With These Security Basics.

This month's topic:  Use Strong Passwords and Change Default Ones

According to  the Council's Guide - About 80% of breaches involved guessed or stolen passwords!

Here is what they recommend:

CHANGE YOUR PASSWORDS REGULARLY. Treat your passwords like a toothbrush. Don’t let anyone else use them and get new ones every three months.

SEEK HELP. Ask your vendors or service providers about default passwords and how to change them. Then do it!

For more information on managing passwords, click here.

MAKE THEM HARD TO GUESS. The most common passwords are “password” and “123456.” Hackers try easily-guessed passwords because they’re used by half of all people. A strong password has seven or more characters and a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and symbols (like !@#$&*). A phrase can also be a strong password (and may be easier to remember), like “B1gMac&frieS.”

To see how fast it takes to crack a password, click here.

DON’T SHARE. Insist on each employee having their own login IDs and passwords – never share!

Once a year, we travel to the Lower 48 to a conference called RetailNOW.  We meet with point of sale companies just like Skurla’s and with the nation's leading vendors.  It’s an amazing event that helps us find out what the future holds for the hospitality/retail industries, but it also provides us with a wealth of information on how we can better serve you. This year’s event was in Nashville and for us Alaskan’s, 90+ degree days are way too hot. But the knowledge we bring back makes it all worth while.

“Small businesses are particularly at risk from the costs and opportunity loss associated with a data breach. Implementing the guidance published by the PCI SSC Small Merchant Taskforce will help a small business improve its data security practices and reduce the risk of data theft.“ - Michael Christodoulides, Barclaycard, PCI Small Merchant Taskforce Co-Chair

Security risks are everywhere these days - everyone up and down the chain is affected.  At Skurla's Point of Sale Solutions, we take security very seriously - and wanted to share some resources from the PCI Security Council.  

But first, here are some frightening data points shared by the PCI Security Council:   

• 71% of hackers attack businesses with under 100 employees (Verizon 2012)
• 60% of small businesses experienced a cyber breach (HM Government)
• $20,752 is the average cost to small businesses due to hacking (NSBA)

If this scares you too, keep reading below to learn more about how to protect your business -