What does it really take to secure a chip-n-pin debit card?

I've just had my second chip-n-pin debit card blacklisted within a year due to failed overseas fraudulent cash withdrawal attempts!

The fraudsters are stealing enough of my highly secure chip details, plus identifying my darn PIN when I enter it (VERY) carefully. Luckily for me, I have not changed many of the places that I normally use chip-n-pin in the past year so I have to only stop using it at 2 large trusted and very popular retailers, 1 local convenience retailer, and 2 places where I occassionally get food.

My instinct at the moment is that the theft is occurring inside 1 of the 3 retailers. Lovely stuff!

It occurs to me that the only thing left to do, is not to use chip-n-pin anywhere but at a highly secure ATM, and the cashier inside a bank, on a floor or two above ground!!

But what I don't fully understand is that it seems the thieves are happy to walk away with just 1 entry per location per day/week/month, thereby leaving the bank investigators no pattern that they can use to crack these networks. And these networks must be very well connected with some tiny electronic goodies, some fairly secure channels of communicating with each other in some non-pattern-recognisable manner, and some even more intricate chip programming and card producing facilities. There must surely be some way of looking at enough of the data the banks hold on these things and discovering some patterns - humans are just not capable of not having patterns!

Anyway, whatever the banks are doing so far is working - they apparently rejected these 2 withdrawal attempts due to the fact that they were not consistent with my usage pattern.

Hmmm ... "pattern" has now come up 4 times in this entry. Perhaps the recommendation for chip-n-pin users is actually: create a distinct very small pattern of usage - I do not believe at this time that the law will stop the thiefs, and it is only a matter of time before they're generating all the valid numbers and PINs they can dream of (maybe they already are...then I can actually use mine again!!??!?).

Grrrr!

Some Peter Drucker Management/Leadership/Society Ideas

I stumbled on this 5 Things William Cohen Has Learned from Peter Drucker CIO "taster" article a couple of days ago and realised that now is the time when people are going to start talking less and less about what Peter Drucker used to say and what he used to stand for.

From my perspective, his name has appeared in almost every management text book (about 25) I studied during my BCommerce. I even bought 1 of his books from a bookstore once purely because I recognised his name and just knew the sales price was a bargain!

I really hope some truly controversial "new ideas" person starts challenging the status quo once more - it seems like there is a great deal of regurgitation of management thought process going on.

4 Ideas I took away from quotations of his that gave me much to think about:
1. During the early 80's he argued that CEO compensation should not be more than 20 times what the bottom earner in the company was earning.
Imagine what the world would be like if this thought had held...just imagine... all the people ... living for today ... living in peace ... sharing all the world. *sigh*

2. The most useless thing to do, is do something that should not be done at all, efficiently.

Efficiency takes time and money - it costs A LOT! The absolute waste that goes into doing something that should not be done at all, and then making the process more efficient - awful! I guess this is one of my influencers for always trying to find the fundamentals of what I am doing and why.

3. "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

Actually this quotation has been driven home repeatedly throughout my limited exposure. I am unsure if my current thoughts are more influenced by study or by experience: There are a huge number of managers (title) without leadership skills, and there are a huge number of leaders (personality) without management skills. When you find yourself in the rare (in my humble opinion) circumstance that there are layers of management with leadership skills all around you, magic is very likely to occur, not only during times of crisis, but also during times inbetween.

4. "The best way to predict the future is to create it."

Strange that one of Peter Drucker's core concepts was Management By Objectives (MBO). Or perhaps it is once again a case of Best Practice being formulated and applied without customisation to the circumstance/environment, and without empowering people to do the right thing as they are being measured on the wrong thing. Regardless - about this quotation - imagine a company culture where everyone is an opportunity seeker. When combined with radical and forward looking MBO, things get interesting, but most companies seem to base current MBO plans on past experience/objectives/successes/failures which is all data driven decision making and does not allow for much innovation and active workforce participation.

Like all people who get used as sources of education and inspiration he had/has many proponents and many opponents. You can read more briefly about him on Wikipedia - Peter Drucker and on the Drucker Institute which houses many interesting articles.

Anyway - I hope you read the CIO "taster" article and perhaps some of the ideas spark your further interest! (let me know if they do!)

As for book recommendations - I can't find the 1st/2nd year text I purchased years ago, but I did look around and find these good looking "professional" sources that I will be buying in the near future:

amazon.co.uk

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amazon.com

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