Saturday's Washington Post reports on the woes of CardSystems in Tucson, a credit card processor. A hacker got access to 40 million credit cards. MasterCard, Visa, and the FBI are not amused. The article briefly alludes to how the attack succeeded:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/17/AR2005061701031.html According to http://www.cardsystems.com/careers.html (the recruiting page for the company), CardSystems has the following types of systems installed: Microsoft .NET (and Windows servers) Oracle databases VMS Not a single mention of an IBM zSeries system, RACF, CICS, or IMS in all its job recruiting pages. Which is really too bad, because if they had been processing credit cards through those systems, chances are that hacker wouldn't be having as much "fun" right now. Now, that's not to suggest anyone should rest comfortably. We all face threats like these, and this is no time to get cocky. But, really, isn't it best to start with the right tools for the job, to mitigate the risks? CardSystems will no doubt have some dark weeks and months ahead, and they'll now have to compete against companies that do use zSeries-based technologies for processing credit cards. (FISERV and Fidelity come to mind.) Maybe more IT people need to reassess what works, and business managers need to carefully evaluate IT risk. As technology becomes ever more ingrained in business operations, what are the true costs of security breaches and outages? What systems and software fail less? Are most resistant to security breaches? And who are the talented IT people than can address these concerns? [Speaking for myself.] - - - - - Timothy F. Sipples Senior Software Architect, Enterprise Transformation IBM Americas zSeries Software Phone: (312) 245-4003 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (PGP key available.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
