Visa International offers acquirers and issuers a list of best practices designed to help their customers secure their merchant servers. Retailers should think of the Internet as a back door into their store, Visa executive Rick Hite suggests. But unlike the front door, which ushers in a finite number of shoppers per day, the back door opens up to the whole world. And, as soon as it happens, it's too late. Hite also emphasizes the importance of properly configured firewalls.
Firewalls are essential.
They're the guard that sits at the back door. Yet you can't put one in and expect total security. Hite stresses the significance of logging and monitoring all the transactional activity going in and out of the merchant server. He cautions retailers to make sure their firewall is protected with physical security to prevent tampering from inside, emphasizing that the only people who should have access to the merchant server are trusted employees. So, for example, if the server holds customer information that could be useful to a competitor, appropriate controls to monitor and maintain this data are critical.