2014 Infographic - 63% of businesses don’t encrypt credit cards

Lack of payment card security continues to plague the business world.

During onsite audits and forensic investigations, SecurityMetrics security experts consistently find unencrypted card data ‘lying around’ at business locations. Unencrypted card data is that 16-digit sequence on the front of credit cards, also known as the primary account number (PAN). It made us start to wonder…just how many businesses do this?

This is our third study on stored, unencrypted card data. When compared to last year, the storage has actually decreased. Instead of 71%, 63.86% of businesses store PAN.

See the2015 study on the Danger of Unencrypted Payment Card Data here.

Even though the statistic decreased in 2014, 63% is still an outrageous number of businesses committing a serious security faux pas.

Unprotected card data is the 'low hanging fruit' that is ripe for easy picking, and it's what attackers first look for when they hack a business.

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How do you find unencrypted, stored credit cards?

It’s easiest to locate unencrypted credit cards with a credit card discovery tool.We used the card data discovery tool PANscan^®, to conduct our study. Since the study’s first year, PANscan has found more than 1.2 billion unencrypted card numbers on business networks. That's more than 2.5 cards for every one person in the United States. Woah!


Todownload a free trial of PANscan to see if your business (or personal computer) has credit card data,click here!

SEE ALSO: Is your credit card data leaking?

Without further ado, check out the 2014 study infographic to see what interesting tidbits we found about unencrypted card data this year.


Did you enjoy this infographic? Pleaseshareit!