STANFORD, Calif. -- The National Retail Federation (NRF) applauds President Obama approach to deal with the threat posed by cybercriminals and in a letter to the President offered six ways that the White House and Congress can improve cybersecurity.
NRF president and CEO Matthew Shay issued the following statement on the White House Summit on Cybersecurity & Consumer Protection held February 13 at Stanford University (watch the embedded video for a full replay of the summit):
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/cybersecurity/summit
"We commend the White House and President Obama for providing solution-based leadership around the significant threat posed by hackers and other cybercriminals. We are encouraged that the administration is pursuing a comprehensive approach and proposing the creation of new information sharing and analysis organizations, where companies can share information about cyber threats with the government and across sectors of the economy.
"The executive order is very much in line with what we are already doing to identify, classify and disseminate intelligence on actual and potential cyber threats to more than 150 of the best-known retail brands and companies, large and small. It is an acknowledgement that industries need more flexible and nimble information-sharing platforms to combat cyber threats in the future.
"The NRF information-sharing platform, established and operational since mid-2014, is a joint private/public partnership and includes alerts from both government and non-government sources, including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Secret Service. This real-time and actionable alert system helps retailers and merchants prevent and combat threats to their companies and customers--over 2,000 alerts have been provided to retailers since its inception.
"The retail industry is committed to safeguarding consumer data and looks forward to working with the president and Congress to achieve practical solutions to this serious problem. Whether it's PIN-and-Chip credit cards or adoption of point-to-point data encryption, retailers are leading the fight for stronger cybersecurity."
Six Ways President Obama & Congress Can Improve Cybersecurity
1. Support the immediate passage of federal fraud protection for debit cards, similar to what we enjoy for credit cards. Americans should not have to pay more for fraud protection.
2. Call on the payment card industry to stop relying on fraud-prone signatures and issue pin and chip cards for all Americans, among the least protected consumers in the world.
3. Encourage all entities in the payments system--not just retailers--to adopt point-to-point encryption to protect consumers' payment information throughout the entire payments chain.
4. Endorse the development of open, competitive tokenization standards to replace consumers' sensitive personal data (including payment card data) with non-sensitive "tokens" so that stored information is useless to would-be hackers.
5. Continue support for a single national data breach notification law that would establish a clear disclosure standard for all businesses to inform consumers of breaches whenever and wherever they occur.
6. Support the passage of federal law enforcement legislation that would aid in the investigation and prosecution of criminals that breach our businesses' networks and harm our consumers.
NRF's cybersecurity letter also ran as an ad in The Wall Street Journal and Politico.
NRF is the world's largest retail trade association, representing discount and department stores, home goods and specialty stores, Main Street merchants, grocers, convenience stores, wholesalers, chain restaurants and Internet retailers from the United States and more than 45 countries.
For more on data security and how retailers can go from potential cyber victims to security top guns, look to the February cover story in CSP magazine.
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