Bank of America Merrill Expands EMV Technology in Business Card Portfolio

Amy Macchiaverna

IS 352.02

Professor Harris

April 7^th, 2014

Blog #2

Bank of America Merrill Expands EMV Technology in Business Card Portfolio is an article about expanding chip and PIN technology within all credit card products. Companies are still exploring new options in providing more safety while making credit card purchases, especially while traveling. Many companies, specifically Bank of America Merrill Lynch, are focusing on implementing EMV technologies in their products. EMV, which stands for EuroPay, MasterCard, and Visa, uses an embedded microchip ad a personal identification number (PIN) to validate the card, the consumer, and the payment transaction instead of a cardholder’s signature. This technology provides customers with greater control over fraud and improved security and acceptance all over the world.

“We’re committed to providing the most technologically advanced solutions, which our clients increasingly need to improve efficiencies while adding another layer of security,” said Kevin Phalen, head of Global Card and Comprehensive Payables in Global Transaction Services (GTS). Large companies are looking to invest in these high security credit cards so their employees and clients can travel the world safely, knowing their cards will be accepted at any point of exchange. The bank began issuing these chip-enabled cards in 2013 and has now sold more than 100,000 across the portfolio in the United States alone. The number is predicted to increase as credit cards are issued to middle market and large corporate clients.

Many large corporations have had trouble deciding whether or not to implement this new technology for a long time. It is a very costly project to obtain the proper equipment and technology for chip-enabled cards. Companies who have had identity theft issues in the past are especially curious about EMV technologies. After Target’s databases were hacked last year, they recently decided to equip all stores with their own “REDcards.” By 2015, all 1,800 of Target’s U.S. stores will be equipped with store card readers with chip-enabled smart-card technology. This plan is a $100 million effort to hopefully prevent their databases from being hacked in the future.   

Other large corporations such as Michael Kors, Neiman Marcus, and White Lodging have all produced enough reasons to implement EMV technology into their stores and databases, as they have all recently experienced hackers. By making this technology more readily available, people will be able to use chip-enabled cards all over the world. This will make it much more difficult to hack into companies databases and make people much more comfortable spending their money at large corporations. Target, Michael Kors and Neiman Marcus all suffered huge losses due to the corruption of their databases. If they can find the money to implement chip-enabled technology throughout their stores, there will be much more incentive for customers to go back.

EMV technology is the future of our economy. Hackers are adjusting to the advances in technology, but the technology is not advancing well enough to keep the hackers away. If the chip-enabled cards start being used throughout the world, it will become close to impossible for hackers to steal people’s personal information from companies. And in response to that, companies will not have to suffer the major losses coupled with theft and fraud.

           

http://www.securityweek.com/bank-america-merrill-expands-emv-technology-business-card-portfolio

Oracle Switches to Cloud Computing

Reading many articles about Oracle, this one by Ruchard Adhikari from CRM Buyer, really stuck out to me. The article talks about how Oracle is focusing on “cloud infrastructure companies such as Amazon and SaaS providers such as former ally Salesforce.com.” Also losing their focus on IBM and SAP. “Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said last week that his main rivals were the new generation of cloud companies, and that IBM and SAP were no longer in his gun sights.” With the cloud being very popular and very accessible, it took Oracle “10 years to make its applications available as cloud services because the company offers lots of applications.” This was a very intense time for the company because they had to rewrite all of their applications as well as converting its database to “multienancy to host SaaS applications.” Oracle will now offer both packaged software as well as cloud-based applications.  “Oracle announced 10 cloud computing services at OpenWorld in September. Its cloud applications include CRM on Demand and the Oracle Human Capital Management Cloud.”

            I have never realized that with the advancement in technology, current tech companies need to always be up to date. It is interesting to read that Oracle has dismissed the cloud in the past, but now that it is important in the IT world, they switched to cloud computing. The rewriting of new programs may take years such as Oracle’s rewriting did. Rivalry is extremely important as it is said in the article and competition amongst company’s changes frequently. Switching their competitors to cloud companies allows Oracle to stay up to date. However, modern apps need to be built around social networking and should be easy to use. “According to reports, Oracle’s cloud apps have a user interface modeled after Facebook and that interfaces Oracle and archival SAP built 10 years ago were no longer appropriate.” If a company does not make their programs user friendly, the customer would go out and find a new program that is easier to use. So for Oracle, it was extremely important that when they were rewriting their programs it would be user friendly.

            Today cloud computing is extremely important to the lives of people each and every day. It is very popular to businesses so they are able to work from any location as long as they have reliable internet connection. Cloud computing also saves companies extremes amounts of money because they do not need to invest in storage hardware.  Another plus to cloud computing is that all of your software and applications update automatically. “In the current computing world, everyone agrees that cloud computing enforces the best security policies which makes it hard for unauthorized parties to access or modify your data. Besides, you don’t have to worry should you lose the data on your hard disk.” As our class is beginning to work with Oracle, I am able to see how all of our work is saved to the internet. The whole concept of cloud computing is extremely interesting and saves a lot of time and effort for one when it comes to saving data.

http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/79903.html

http://cloudtweaks.com/2013/07/cloud-computing-benefits-and-importance-on-redesign-your-it-infrastructure/

Qualcomm Boosts High End of Mobile Chip Line

            The article that I read is called “Qualcomm Boosts High End of Mobile Chip Line” that I found it on the Technology section of The Wall Street Journal. The article explains how a company called Qualcomm Inc. is releasing new Snapdragon computer chips by early next year that will add new features to smartphones and tablets. The San Diego based company announced that it plans to add two more chips, which will add faster communications capability as well as support for the new 4K video. Something interesting that I read was that 4K video is considered the successor to todays HDTV, a feature that I did not even know existed. These new chips use a 64-bit computing capability that allows the hardware to use larger pools of memory.

            What really surprised me while I was reading this article was when the large technological company Samsung was written about. As we all know, Samsung is one of the leading innovators in the smartphone and tablet industries today. It explains that Samsung’s newest smartphone, the Galaxy S5, uses some Snapdragon chips instead of their internally built Samsung chips. This makes me understand that Qualcomm Inc. does in fact produce a good product since big technological companies use Snapdragon chips instead of their own. This section of the article made me wonder what other big technological corporations use other company’s products.

            Toward the end of the article, the executive vice president of Qualcomm Inc. comments on the future plans the company. Murthy Renduchintala explained that the LTE wireless capability of these future chips use multiple frequency bands that can deliver data at around 300 megabits per second. This is a huge innovation because previous chip models had a maximum speed of 150 megabits per second. From this I can conclude that these newly designed chips are in fact much more powerful than previous models.

            This article got me very interested in Qualcomm Inc. because I had never heard of it before. So, I searched for related articles that spoke about Qualcomm Inc. big innovation that will come out early next year. I found an article on PCWorld.com that spoke about the new Snapdragon Chips. In this article I learned that Qualcomm couldn’t use these new chips on Android products until Google released a 64-bit mobile device. This article also quotes a Qualcomm executive calling Apple’s A7, the first 64-bit chip, a “marketing gimmick.” I thought this was interesting because it shows the competition between heavy weight companies in the technological world.

            Overall, these two articles were very informing. I was not aware of this new technology that is going to be released next year, let alone what the company Qualcomm Inc. did. Reading articles like this make me excited for the future of the technology that we have become so attached to. The world of technology is always changing, and it is good to know that there are innovators out there that are always working to release the new best product. I look forward to seeing what these powerful chips can do for our smartphones and tablets in the future.  

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579486452281269832?mod=LS1

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2140500/qualcomm-adds-fastest-ever-64bit-snapdragon-mobile-chip.html

Social Media and Big Data

This article begins with comments made by the president of Oracle, Mark Hurd.  He states Big Data spending is growing at a rate of 40% annually, which accounts for 10% of the IT budget. Hurd believes the emergence of social media is a major cause for the increase in demand for using large amounts of data in supply chain applications. Hurd spoke with a Director of Supply Chain Planning for a major international brand about how they now use social media, and mobile promotions, to control the balance of supply and demand. He discovered they sell perishable items, so a highly responsive supply chain is needed. To achieve this goal, they have a network of national warehouses serving regional warehouses with nightly deliveries based on the most recent demand data. Control of supply and demand is maintained by stocking regional warehouses with what will be promoted the coming week via social media and mobile promotions in the region. This company uses their social media presence to develop and launch successful new products based on customer feedback. The company is able to fund this operation by selling at greater profit margins due to brand recognition. It would be more difficult for a small and lesser known company to achieve such success in this way, as they would not have the same money or resources at their command; however, the concept could be something to adapt into their current practices.

Social media is the new go-to department in every company. Everyone you know has a Facebook, Twitter or even a LinkedIn profile. Companies have learned this is an essential piece of their customer’s daily lives and have expanded their teams to specifically reach out to them. However, many companies are still in the early days of employment for social media related positions and most are way behind in trying to analyze this social media data. “We have millions of tweets about our brands, thousands of Facebook “likes,” hundreds of thousands of check-ins on Foursquare. Pinterest and Instagram are adding even more to social-media data deluge.” This all amounts to the “Big Data” that companies have to now try and keep up with. “Big data” refers to a companies growing ability to collect large amounts of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. However, do these companies fully understand what all this data is? Companies need to train people to make sense of this data. In order to make sense of this data, companies will need to hire data analysts who specialize in making use of the overwhelming amount of new data created every day. “You will need a strong database person to put the data into forms that can be analyzed. You also will need statisticians who can understand the data and its impact. You must have people adept at understanding behavioral data. The data we are receiving from social media is vastly different from the static, transactional data we had previously gathered. It is unstructured, fluid, mobile and often contradictory.”

Data analysts can help improve the bottom line of any organization by forecasting how to either increase revenues, save money, or mitigate risk. For example, the company that sells perishable items has to operate daily deliveries of their items to retail outlets. A data analyst may be able to optimize the routes of the delivery trucks based on inventory and projected demand. Thanks to the advanced inventory systems and analysis tools offered by companies such as Oracle, the supply chain can be optimized to greater detail than ever before.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevebanker/2014/02/10/president-of-oracle-speaks-on-big-data-at-oracle-supply-chain-conference/

http://www.forbes.com/sites/onmarketing/2012/06/28/social-media-and-the-big-data-explosion/

WhatsApp Faces New Challenges

Whatsapp is a mobile messaging app that allows you to send messages without having to pay anything.  This is a new app that has been popular and in high demand over the past one to two years or so.  Whatsapp uses the same data plan that you use on your smartphone to browse the Internet or check your email with so there is no additional cost.  Whatsapp is available on the IPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows phone. 

I personally downloaded Whatsapp on my IPhone a couple of months ago because I had a bunch of friends that were studying abroad in other countries around the world and I wanted to stay in contact with them on a day-to-day basis without getting charged an international fee for calling or texting.  I soon realized that I could just use Imessage on my IPhone and just turn my Wi-Fi on.  I came to realize that I did not have to have this app. 

Whatsapp ran into a few problems though a few months ago.  These problems had to due with security and privacy issues with this application.  According to this article, “Xuyang Li, founder of TrustGo Mobile, said that he downloaded Whatsapp and when he opened the application the account was registered to a woman named Jessica, who was the previous owner of his used phone.”  This happened because when you are a new user to Whatsapp all you need to do is enter your phone number and not your username or password.  So when Mr. Li went to create his account all he did was entered his phone number, which was the same as Jessica’s, and so it technically never created a new account.  This has probably happened multiple times.  If you are going to sell your phone to someone or just give it away you probably want to make sure you erase all the data off of your phone and sign out of all your applications.  This is something very easy to do and will save you the hassle when someone tries to hack your accounts or tries to steal your identity. 

Whatsapp stores all their information about their users on a server.  This is how incidents like this can accidentally occur.  Also, since all the information is being stored in a huge database, hackers can easily access it.  This is why something needs to be done in order to prevent things like this from happening.  Whatsapp does not ask you many questions (personal questions) when you go to create an account.  It is not like a company like Facebook where they ask you personal information when you create an account.  Facebook also just recently bought Whatsapp for $19 million.

Since Whatsapp ran into this problem they now implemented a few security/privacy protocols.  Now when you sign up, Whatsapp sends you a verification code and it advises you to delete your old account or transfer your old account to your new phone number so you do not run into any problems.  Also, Whatsapp now automatically deletes/deactivates your account if it is inactive for 45 days.  I believe that this is a good safety measure and will insure that your data is safe.  Whatsapp also claims that they do not save your messages that are being sent back and forth between users.  These messages are not being saved on any servers or anything like that.  

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303546204579437103717035962?KEYWORDS=privacy+issues&mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303546204579437103717035962.html%3FKEYWORDS%3Dprivacy%2Bissues&fpid=2,7,121,122,201,401,641,1009

Opposition Rises in Response to Bulk Data Sweeps

In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's reveal of the NSA's surveillance of phone calls and emails throughout the United States, the country has faced significant backlash from the public. The outcry has been so significant that President Barack Obama has proposed legislation that will end the country's bulk collection of telephone data by the NSA. The article details the emergence of a coalition that asks the President to implement a ban of all bulk collection of personal data in the United States, and not just limit it to telephone information. If this movement can gather significant momentum, then the collection of personal internet and financial information could potentially cease.

The government may be hesitant to comply with this proposal because it would significantly limit the means in which they can access information. The practices certainly seem unethical in the eyes of many Americans, but it seems unlikely that the government would be willing to essentially remove the internet as a source to extract information on potential national threats. Despite the growing support for the widespread ban on the bulk collection of data by the NSA, the actual implementation of this ban seems unrealistic.

A potential negative result of this ban that people may be overlooking is the possibility of less protective measures taken by the individuals who make their information constantly available on the internet. Of course Americans should have the right to use the internet in any way they desire without having to worry about any threats of having their information stolen, but they should always act as if their information has the potential to be stolen. For example, if this ban were to be implemented, internet users may not feel the need to check the validity of certain websites that desire user input because they know that the government will not be using their information. Just because the government would no longer be collecting internet data does not mean that the threat is completely eradicated. The country should be mindful of the fact that no matter what regulations are put into place, the threat for data breaches will always exist in this era of technology, and a lack of awareness for this threat could pose more trouble for internet users than any government spying that took place through the NSA.

The only true way for user information to be protected fully is for greater emphasis to be placed on data security from Information Technology departments across the country, and the world. The application of additional resources, such as education, time, and money towards the strengthening of
data security will help to keep all professional and personal information safe across the internet. This is by no means an easy task, but these efforts are far more likely to gain both citizen and government support than a legislative movement to eliminate the bulk collection of internet data because they work towards the best interests of all parties involved. Strengthening data security across the board will make for a safer internet, a safer country, and a safer world knowing that personal and professional information is not at risk for theft.

AFP. "Coalition Wants US to End Bulk Data Sweep | SecurityWeek.Com." Coalition Wants US to End Bulk Data Sweep | SecurityWeek.Com. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

Future in Cyber Security

In his article, “Singapore Unites to Keep Cyber Threats at Bay,” Sol E. Solomon mentioned the bright future of IT security professionals in Singapore. Cyber threats can be as devastating to a country as physical security risks. This recognition prompted Singapore to initiate a joint participation, enlisting the government, enterprises and individuals to enhance the nation's information security competencies and resilience against cyber attacks. Since April 2008, Singapore launched a $46 million Infocom Security Masterplan 2 (MP2), which the local government has worked closely with the private sector and individuals to combat cyber threats. The MP2 initiative also included Association of Information Security Professionals (AISP) – the aim of raising the standing, professionalism, and trust of IT security professionals in the country.

Imperva Asia-Pacific & Japan is a computer and networking security firm that focuses on businesses’ data security throughout all parts of Asia, including Singapore. Stree Naidu, Vice President of Imperva Asia-Pacific & Japan, praised the Singaporean government for their efforts in building awareness in cyber security, "[We] have noted a rising trend of increased cyber security awareness among businesses, especially over the last year. During uncertain economic times, reputations of companies are at stake. Any involvement in legal suits and loss of customer confidence could quicken a company’s demise. Hence, companies are adopting a cautious approach and re-looking security risks."

Nowadays, database is one of the most valuable assets for businesses, and many firms acknowledge the importance of database implantation. Database speed, storage capacity, and security are few of the important attributes to consider prior to business purchase. However, many are willing to compromise on security in exchange for the other factors. Such problematic behaviors are the outcome of shortsighted-business firms. Database speed and storage are generally prioritized because of their direct relationship with a firm’s profitability (higher access speed can increase productivity; increase in storage capacity can cut down the expense for purchasing multiple storage systems). Although security systems are important, the ability tends to be viewed as an additional cost. A well-structured security system can be extremely costly due to the size of the database. As a result, the majority of firms invested little in the cyber security featuring. In other words, most firms in the world have insufficient or no security systems. Consequently, these firms became the targets of cyber criminals, and the common targets for cyber criminals are private customer information such as credit card numbers and social security code.

            In reality, minor security breaches are rarely detected due to the poor precautions. Therefore, incidences are normally serious when they are found. These incidences will negatively impact a firm, as the recent Target security breach has shown (December 2013) – Most customers are extremely sensitive about their private information. Due to public concerns, data security has become an inevitable influential factor in business’ prosperity. However, as companies take on a proactive approach to adopt fundamental cyber security measures, threats such as spams, botnet attacks, and hackers are evolving strategically day by day. Therefore, it is crucial for companies to further educate their employees and train them to manage such threats appropriately. Though security systems may be costly, but the consequence of not having a functional security system will lead firms to a greater loss. On a larger scale, the ability to defend against cyber threats will determine a countries’ overall strength. In the long run, cyber security systems will prove its importance to firms’ or countries’ success and sustainability.

Works Cited

Solomon, Sol E. "S'pore Unites to Keep Cyber Threats at Bay." ZDNet. ZDNet, 03 Mar. 2009. Web. 05 Apr. 2014. <http://www.zdnet.com/spore-unites-to-keep-cyber-threats-at-bay-2062051758/>.