Samsung has hit a spot of trouble, with the news that LoopPay, a US-based subsidiary of the company, has been targeted by hackers.
This is particularly important because as the New York Times reports, LoopPay’s magnetic secure transmission technology is the cornerstone of Samsung’s mobile payment system.
It’s believed that the hackers, who are allegedly Chinese and affiliated to the government of that country, broke into LoopPay’s network back in March, over half a year ago now.
Given that the firm didn’t discover the intrusion until August had almost ended, that’s a pretty worrying length of time for the network to have been compromised. However, it’s the office network of LoopPay which was breached, and not the production network that handles payment transactions and is run by Samsung -- which is a completely separate system.
At this point, it seems that customer data is safe, and Samsung has come out with a statement to say that Samsung Pay users have not been affected by this affair.
Samsung called it an isolated incident, and said that at no point was customer payment information at risk.
Following the discovery of the breach, LoopPay enlisted the services of two independent security teams, and has conducted a "thorough and extensive sweep" of its whole system, with new safeguards being introduced where appropriate.
Samsung asserted: "We’re confident that Samsung Pay is safe and secure. Each transaction uses a digital token to replace a card number. The encrypted token combined with certificate information can only be used once to make a payment. Merchants and retailers can’t see or store the actual card data".
Nevertheless, even a sniff of bad sounding publicity on the security front isn’t good news for a payment system.
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