Securing The Tunnel: The Retail Systems Dealer's Remote Management Responsibilities

For many in the retail systems dealer community, internet-enabled remote access and support capabilities have been a godsend. Countless resellers, ISVs, and tech integrators have successfully expanded their geographic market reach while simultaneously lowering their support costs by enabling remote support, whereby many hardware and software issues can be diagnosed— and often fixed—without the need for an expensive truck roll and an on-site technician. Remote access to merchant POS systems is also an increasingly popular means of inexpensively executing software updates and conducting end-user training.

There is, however, a potentially dark side to enabling remote access to merchants’ mission-critical retail systems. By design, these systems transmit extremely sensitive information, not the least of which being the consumer payment card data that’s so sought after by hackers, who are willing to expose any security gap they can find to attain it. In fact, according to Trustwave®, 63% of 450 data breaches it studied in 2012 were caused by security vulnerabilities that were introduced by a third party. 1 Thus, the dealer community has an obligation to secure remote access points to merchant systems, as well as the networks that facilitate them. In fact, the PCI SSC (Payment Card Industry Security Standard) requires it.

With that said, demonstrated compliance with PCI DSS requirements isn’t just good for the dealer’s self-protection; it can also help dealers win and maintain business among an increasingly security-wary merchant community. In this paper, we’ll outline the remote management security imperative and the steps dealers can take to meet it.

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