No One Solution In The Cybersecurity War

In the fallout of the data breach that affected Target, Neiman Marcus, and other major retailers, many solutions have been proposed to ensure similar incidents don't happen in the future.

Many have claimed that a switch to EMV cards in the U.S. market would hinder future attacks such as these. In fact, Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel is one such advocate. In a CNBC interview shortly after the breach was made public he used the opportunity to push for EMV adoption in the U.S. Additionally, Target CFO John Mulligan told the Senate Judiciary Committee recently that the company is speeding up the process of implementing EMV-enabled POS terminals at its stores. He said the company's own credit cards would be EMV-enabled by the end of 2014, and all Target stores would be ready to accept EMV cards of any kind by January 2015.

But some warn that migrating to EMV cards won't be a catch-all solution to prevent all card fraud in the future. According to Dan Ingevaldson, CTO of security solutions provider Easy Solutions, EMV technology would not have prevented the Target fraud from happening. He says that the malware that affected Target was looking for account information in the memory inside point-of-sale (POS) devices, where it's unencrypted. Therefore, Ingelvadson says, the criminals would have been able to obtain this information even if it came from chip and PIN cards, since the stolen information was not directly taken off the cards themselves.

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