The application of pre-paid cash card for consumers

Prepaid cash cards are plastic cards, which fall under the pay first category of plastic payments. Prepaid cash cards can be used to make payment for goods and services and even to withdraw money. Before use, the user needs to load the card with a sum of money. This means there is no risk of running into debt as it has no credit or overdraft facility. Prepaid cash cards are designed to be used as a safer alternative as compare to cash.

The prepaid cash card is of use in several ways. For example, we can use it for paying bill, such as rent, utilities, insurance, car payment, and cell phone bills. Besides, we can shop at anywhere as long as the card using is accepted at different retailers, buys fuel at the pump, pay by phone, and shop on the Internet. We also can use it for transferring money - for some prepaid cash card they provide the convenient such as send or receive money via bank wire transfers, between two cards.

The following are some examples of the prepaid cash card:

Touch ‘n Go (TnG) smart card is used by Malaysian for electronic payment system to toll expressway and highway. It is expanding its business to retail purchase by starting with fast food industry that enables consumers to buy dough nut, burger or fast-food from 21 outlets such as Burger King, 7-Eleven, Dunkin’ Donut. It is imitating the success of Hong Kong’s Octopus Card by setting 5 to 10% of the card holders for retail purchase as current target of the company.

Octopus Card was launched in Hong Kong on year 1997, September. It is a rechargeable contactless stored value smart card to transfer electronic payments in online in offline system. It is widely used in payment system for transportation, supermarkets, fast food restaurant, car parks and other pint of sale application such as service station s and vending machines that have achieved good outcomes.

The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

The threat of online security: How safe is our data?

The threat of online security can be distinguish between nontechnical and technical.

Nontechnical attacks are those in which a perpetrator uses some form of deception or persuasion to trick people into revealing information or performing actions that can compromise the security of a network. Examples are pretexting and social engineering.

Technical attack is an attack perpetrated using software and system knowledge or expertise. An example of technical attack is a computer worm.

Types of attacks
Zero-day incidents are attacks through previously unknown weaknesses in their computer network.

Denial of service is an attack in which so many requests for service or access bombard a system that it crashes or cannot respond. Zombied PCs can be used to launch DOS attacks or spread adware.

Phishing is a crimeware technique to steal the identity of a target company to get the identities of customers.

Web servers and web pages can be hijacked and configured to control or redirect unsuspecting users to scam or phishing sites.

A botnet is a huge number of hijacked Internet computers that have been set up to forward spam and viruses to other computers on the Internet.

A virus is a piece of software code that inserts itself into a host, including the operating systems, running its host program activates the virus.

A worm is a software program that runs independently, consuming the resources of its host in order to maintain itself, that is capable of propagating a complete working version of itself into another machine.

A macro virus is a virus or worm that executes when the application object that contains the macro is opened or a particular procedure is executed.

Trojan horse is a program that appears to have a useful function but that contains a hidden function that presents a security risk.

Trojan-Phisher-Rebery is a new variant of a Trojan program that stole tens of thousands of stolen identities from 125 countries that the victims believed were collected by legitimate company.

Banking Trojan is a Trojan that comes to life when computer owners visit one of a number of online banking or e-commerce sites.
Rootkit is a special Trojan Horse program that modifies existing operating system software so that an intruder can hide the presence of Trojan program.