ANX Corporate Blog

A pizza joint has to worry about PCI compliance. PCI Compliance is securing their customer’s credit card and personal information. A hospital has to worry about HIPAA compliance. HIPAA compliance is securing a patient’s personal information.

What if you have to worry about both?

Pharmacies are in this unique situation. They are receiving information on a customer’s prescription. This falls under HIPAA. They then have to charge the customer via credit card. This falls under PCI.

Which one is more important?

That’s a loaded question. A violation of either can result is massive fees, fines and bad PR. So both are equal and extremely important. A slip up, and you could lose your pharmacy. Fees, fines and loss of business can often stretch over $100,000 following a...

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Ebay, the online auction site, recently revealed that a hacker may have copied all 145 million users to the site. This information includes home address, encrypted passwords, e-mails and birth dates. No financial data, including Paypal, was comprised.

So, with the numbers affected, it’s likely you are on the list. So what can you do now to protect yourself?

1. Change your password. Go on eBay right now and update your password. As we always breach, use a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and a special character.
2. Change other passwords. This applies if you use your eBay password on other web site. E-mail, social media, utilities, banking, etc.  Remember to always use different passwords on different sites and accounts. So if you, don’t this is the time to do...
   
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It was recently revealed that the Heartbleed bug, a vulnerability in the OpenSSL program that powers encrypted communication to many of the world's web sites and private networks, may have affected as many 500,000 systems.

It was recently announced to customers that ANX were not affected because the versions of SSL ANX uses were not vulnerable to the bug.

"We initiated both internal and external scans with neither scans showing a compromise in our system's vulnerability," said Jim Schmidt, ANX Executive Vice President of Operations.

So why is this a big deal? The bug could expose any data that the OpenSSL process can read. This means usernames, passwords, private keys and even credit card and social security numbers could be easily accessible. 

Android, Cisco...

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The day has arrived. R.I.P Windows XP. We loved you. We hated you. And now you are gone.

As of April 8, 2014, Windows XP is no longer supported and updated by Microsoft. It’s called an “end-of-life.”

Microsoft has gone on recording as saying they predict there will be a large increase in malware infections after April 8. Hackers, spammers and cyber criminals are all expected to exploit security holes.

For retail businesses that take credit cards, it is simple. If you are running Windows XP on any of your computers, you are no longer PCI Compliant. It comes down to PCI DSS Requirement 6.2, which states that you will “Ensure that all system components and software are protected from known vulnerabilities by installing applicable vendor-supplied security patches....

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Windows XP is the most successful and popular Windows-based operating systems in history. At its peak, it was estimate that 400 million users were using the operating system world-wide. Even though Microsoft had ended the regular upgrades and improvements to Windows XP in April 2009, it was estimated that it still owned 20% of market share as of December 2012.

In less than 14 months from now, Microsoft will officially end the extended support of Windows XP. What this means is that Microsoft will no longer issue security update patches for this dated operating system that was introduced in 2001.

Although there’s no specific study in the retail market, we estimated that a sizeable number of retail POS systems and PCs are still running Windows XP. The end of this OS support...

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