ICBA Statement on Home Depot Data Breach
Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) September 09, 2014 -- The Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA) today released the following statement on the Home Depot data breach.
“This breach is yet another reminder why information sharing is vital among all participants in the payments system—better, timelier information translates into greater fraud detection and prevention on behalf of consumers.
“In a retailer’s breach of this magnitude, even the smallest community bank will have to reissue payment cards. Community banks absorb these costs upfront because their primary concern is to protect their customers from fraud. However, these costs should ultimately be borne by the party that experiences the breach. This is critical to ensure that all parties storing consumer data have incentives to maximize data security efforts.
“Banks dedicate hundreds of millions of dollars annually to securing their customers’ data and adhere to strict laws and regulations at both the federal and state levels. Similar requirements should be placed on all participants using and accessing consumers’ personal information. Equity within the payments system is a must for consumer protection in today’s increasingly vulnerable cyber landscape.
“The bottom line is that protecting the payments system is a shared responsibility of all participants involved, including retailers. All must invest the necessary resources to combat increasingly sophisticated breach threats to the payments system.”
This is why ICBA continues to advocate our key data security principles to Congress and the payment card networks. ICBA’s core principles include:
• the costs of data breaches should ultimately be borne by the party at fault for the breach,
• all participants in the payments system—including merchants—should be subject to Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act–like data security standards,
• a national data-security breach and notification standard should be implemented to replace the current patchwork of state laws,
• unnecessary barriers to effective threat-information sharing between law enforcement and the financial and retail sectors should be removed, and
• while community banks and other financial institutions continue to move to chip technology for debit and credit cards, these technologies alone may not have prevented the recent retailer breaches and do not protect against fraud in “card-not-present” transactions, such as online purchases.
More information on ICBA’s efforts and data-security resources for community banks and their customers are available on ICBA’s online security breach toolkit.
About ICBA
The Independent Community Bankers of America®, the nation’s voice for more than 6,500 community banks of all sizes and charter types, is dedicated exclusively to representing the interests of the community banking industry and its membership through effective advocacy, best-in-class education and high-quality products and services. For more information, visit http://www.icba.org.
# # #
Jessica Wallace, Independent Community Bankers of America, http://www.icba.org, +1 (202) 821-4328, [email protected]
Share this article