Cybersecurity people are warning that point of sale hacking is on the rise. This adds risk to your shopping and the exploits harvesting payment account numbers and PINs will become increasingly prevalent.
They are pointing out the existence of serious vulnerablilities in the point of sale systems throughtout the country which could lead to bigger and more wide spread security breaches from the holiday shopping season well into next year.
Now then, the first thing I can think of is traversing the public domain. I believe more closed systems are in order to keep the data away from those out there prowling around looking for an easy mark.
These compromised networks upon which some business relies need to be a source of consequences for those stores who would take your card and store that data in areas which are easily accessible to malware payloads and other cyber nasties.
If they can't get to it they can't steal it. There needs to be more encryption and more vetting of those people handling the data. A person can compromise a well thought out network with a single access of some internet file or removable medium such as flash drives.
Retailers taking your financials need to think more and be more vigilant. It has been my experience that Point of Sale and Web Systems are often the same system. Kind of hard to isolate POS when it's your web front end as well.
Consequences for getting hacked should be more than the customer's — the stores should be fined and outed and closed or AT LEAST made subject to so much forensic investigation that they think twice about placing a slack POS interface at the people's disposal. I hate stupid computer people. Retail seems to have an over abundance of them.