March/April 2014
Wisconsin Community Banker
19
Liquidity Planning
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Young & Associates, Inc.
Bankers Working For Bankers
800.525.9775
e-mail phishing attack and in turn infected the giant retailer
through its vendor portal. From the vendor portal hack-
ers were able to infect many point-of-sale systems. Target
learned the hard way that its vendor portal and point-of-
sale systems should remain separate. In the end, 40 million
cards and 70 million customer records were hacked.
While the media rightly made much of the Target breach,
the truth is that cyber security breaches have become com-
monplace. “There are so many small breaches all the time,”
Knutson said, “that no one knows what the whole picture
looks like.”
To be fair, Target actually did a good job in communicat-
ing news of the breach to consumers, according to Knutson.
Target’s communications efforts were quite fast, compared
to the victims of previous incidents. And the extensive
media coverage increased public awareness of electronic
crimes.
Among many lessons to learn from the Target breach:
Continually review your IT risk assessment plans and
efforts.
Review payment processors and other vendor relation-
ships—for instance, have you asked all if they no longer use
Windows XP?
Stay up to speed with security trends.
Never stop learning!
“Banks can’t be perfect,” Knutson said, “but they need to
be less vulnerable than anyone else.”
Growth in Mobile Banking, Payments
Continues
The use of mobile phones to access bank and credit
card accounts continued to increase, according to a
March report by the Federal Reserve Board.
The Fed’s latest report on the use of mobile financial
services found that 33 percent of all mobile phone users
and 51 percent of smartphone users had used mobile
banking in the past 12 months as of December 2013.
This is up from 28 percent in December 2012 for mobile
phone users and 48 percent for smartphone users.
The use of mobile phones to make payments at the
point of sale has grown substantially over the past sev-
eral years, increasing threefold between 2011 and 2012
and again between 2012 and 2013. Last year, 17 percent
of smartphone owners, representing 9 percent of the
U.S. adult population, reported having used their phone
to make a purchase at a retail store in the previous 12
months.
