Eckoh urges businesses to take contact centre customer data seriously
Eckoh, the global provider of secure payment products and customer contact solutions,was appalled, but not surprised to hear of the recent leak of sensitive audio customer data in the US. While banks and financial institutions privately confirm to Eckoh that contact centre breaches happen regularly, last week’s public disclosure of an audio data leak is worrying. Audio recordings containing over 17,000 customers’ credit card details were made public.
In total over 400,000 records were leaked, including thousands of audio recordings where customers give their names, addresses, phone number, credit card numbers, security “CVV” numbers, and more. According to MacKeeper, who discovered and analysed the leak, there is enough information in each call to provide cyber criminals with all they need to steal the credit card information or commit a wide range of crimes. Some of the recordings do not warn customers that the calls are being recorded or stored.
Director of Payments Strategy at Eckoh, Cam Ross, urges businesses to ensure that they take every precaution to secure their customers data.
“At Eckoh we’ve been emphasising this message for some years, urging businesses to keep pace with the evolving secure card payment solutions to avoid security breaches and fraud. Our key point is that the risk of these sort of breaches can be easily avoided if you don’t hold the information in the first place. Eckoh’s solutions prevent the sensitive cardholder details getting into the business in the first place, so it is not possible to recordor store them.”
In the event that calls are recorded, customers’ card details should be masked using DTMF or Audio Tokenization solutions such as Eckoh’s CallGuard.
Eckoh’s secure payment solution is the best way to prove to customers that when they buy from a business, their card and personal data is protected and secure. This is the biggest reassurance businesses can give customers today, especially in light of these recent data breaches.
Cam Ross continues, “Contact centres are notoriously difficult environments to secure, but there are solutions available that avoid these sort of incidents occurring. By making data meaningless, useless or not available at all to criminals, your customers remain protected.”
Additional Information
Eckoh is a global provider of secure payment products and customer contact solutions, supporting an international client base from its offices in the UK and US.
Our secure payments products, which include the patented CallGuard, can be hosted in the Cloud or deployed on the client’s site and remove sensitive personal and payment data from contact centres and IT environments. The products offer merchants a simple and effective way to reduce the risk of fraud, secure sensitive data and become compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (“PCI DSS”) and wider data security regulations. Eckoh has been a PCI DSS Level One accredited Service Provider since 2010, processing over $1bn in card payments annually.
Eckoh’s customer contact solutions enable enquiries and transactions to be performed on whatever device the customer chooses, allowing organisations to increase efficiency, lower operational costs and provide a true Omni-channel experience. We also assist organisations in transforming the way that they engage with their customers by providing support and transition services as they implement our innovative customer contact solutions.
Our large portfolio of clients come from a broad range of vertical markets and includes government departments, telecoms providers, retailers, utility providers and financial services organisations.
For additional information on Eckoh visit their Website or view their Company Profile
