Ahead of the holidays, gift-givers gave away millions of magnetic stripe gift cards charged with billions of dollars in value. By now, the money might already be stolen.
It’s obvious why gift cards are so popular with merchants. The digital form of the old-fashioned gift certificate is much easier to track and trace since it fits neatly into credit card payment processing systems and into wallets. They also act as irresistible loyalty cards, drawing in consumers who might not otherwise visit the store — consumers who often spend more than the value of the card once they arrive. And stumped gift givers seem to love them — over $20 billion was charged onto gift cards in 2000, with much more expected when the figure is tallied this year.
View: Complete article at MSNBC
News source: MSNBC - Retail gift cards often unprotected
It’s obvious why gift cards are so popular with merchants. The digital form of the old-fashioned gift certificate is much easier to track and trace since it fits neatly into credit card payment processing systems and into wallets. They also act as irresistible loyalty cards, drawing in consumers who might not otherwise visit the store — consumers who often spend more than the value of the card once they arrive. And stumped gift givers seem to love them — over $20 billion was charged onto gift cards in 2000, with much more expected when the figure is tallied this year.
View: Complete article at MSNBC News source: MSNBC - Retail gift cards often unprotected
Hack attacks
Atri Chatterjee, a spokesman for McAfee, said although a lot of people used stand-alone anti-virus programs many forgot to update them regularly, leaving them vulnerable to viruses that exploited recently found loopholes.
Even those who used a personal firewall to protect themselves and their computer from unwelcome intruders could be caught out by the sheer number of security vulnerabilities and patch programs that were reported every week, he said.
A study by anti-virus company MessageLabs found that the number of viruses circulating on the net has leapt in the last year.
In 2000, MessageLabs was stopping a virus every 700 e-mails. Now, the figure is one virus in every 370 messages.
Research has found that those who use broadband net connections are at real risk of attack from malicious hackers and computer vandals.
Because broadband connections are "always on", attackers typically have more time to find and try to penetrate computers linked to the net in this way.
Computers online via a broadband link have proved very popular with vandals who use them as proxies to carry out "denial of service attacks" in which a target machine is bombarded with bogus data packets.
Remote control
For £17.95 a year, McAfee will take on the burden of updating anti-virus software for customers to ensure that they stay protected against viruses.
For an extra £20.95 per annum, subscribers get a firewall managed remotely by McAfee that keeps out those that want to harvest personal information from a computer or recruit that machine for a future attack.
Both programs are updated, managed and monitored via the web by McAfee.
"Three out of four people are surfing naked and are open to all kinds of hacking attempts," said Mr Chatterjee.
The McAfee security subscription service has been running in the US since April 1999 and now has more than 1.2 million customers.
The service is available now in the UK and Germany and will be rolled out to 12 more countries in 2002.
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