Security at the Point of Sale

Cash, cards, inventory and customer data intersect at the online point of sale. Here's how to keep your defenses up to date.

When thieves stole the PIN pads at a cash register in one of his company's stores everyone was amazed. Not that they'd done it—such thefts can happen once a week during the holiday season. But watching it on videotape later, "I couldn't tell they had it with them when they left" the store, says director of systems and data security at one of the stores , a Montreal retailer now owned by The Limited.

They got them back onto the point-of-sale system quickly. But here's where security precautions kicked in: Its PIN pads in effect have their own Media Access Control address, and once they're disconnected, that address is no longer available. So the thieves were foiled—this time.

The point of sale and online point f sale have always been a targets for thieves. While they once went after the cash drawer, retailers often find themselves facing sophisticated networks of thieves intent on the criminal equivalent of volume discounts—reams of credit card data, entire shelves of goods to launder or, in the case of pharmaceuticals like Sudafed, drugs used for making methamphetamines. Retailers, then, operate under the constant threat of having their point of sale either hacked by cyberthieves or spoofed by real ones.

Between them, these various thieves target all the major aspects of a modern online point-of-sale system:
* The cash register
* The bar-code scanner
* Wireless access
* The in-store voice or IP network
* The store inventory management system
(c)By Michael Fitzgerald

so.. developers of this online point of sale paid huge attention to security issues.