Tribute partner, 3Delta Systems, Inc. (3DSI), a leader in online credit card processing solutions and a pioneer in safeguarding confidential payment data through tokenization, is observing National Cyber Security Awareness Month by issuing a set of business best practices for protecting customer credit card account information and minimizing corporate exposure to online payment scams.

Entitled "10 Business Best Practices for Fighting Credit Card Theft and Fraud," 3DSI's tips consists of tried-and-true tools and techniques for companies to use in detecting and deterring online thieves from stealing sensitive payment data from their computer systems. The best practices are available for Download here.

"Given the ingenuity of cyber criminals and the sheer volume of electronic business-to-business (B2B) payment transactions, someone - somewhere - will inevitably break through your company's front-end access control and authentication safeguards," said Aaron Bills, founder and chief operating officer of 3Delta Systems.

"A sound business payment security system shouldn't merely detect intrusions," Bills explained. "It should also plan for 'graceful failure' - a strategy that assumes, if one safeguard fails and a perpetrator gains access to one part of your computer network, other countermeasures will be in place to contain the attack, render it less harmful or lock down confidential data so it's worthless to hackers."

Study after study shows that failure to protect sensitive payment data from a breach leads to massive financial costs, customer defections, lawsuits and loss of reputation. According to the Ponemon Institute's latest U.S. Cost of a Data Breach Study, data heists during 2010 cost companies an average of $7.2 million, up 7 percent from 2009.

To help businesses stay secure, 3DSI launched Payment WorkSuite®, an easy-to-use platform built from the ground up to save enterprises money on payment processing costs, improve their productivity and protect sensitive information from prying eyes.

The company also pioneered credit card tokenization technology in 2003 called CardVault® that enables merchants to exchange their customers' confidential card data for randomly generated payment "tokens," a process that safely replaces real card numbers with a string of characters which then become useless to would-be hackers. Merchants use only the token key reference for each customer transaction while the real card data remains offsite at 3DSI's secure processing centers.

Tribute, Inc. and 3Delta Systems have partnered to give Tribute customers the ability to manage, tokenize, store, authorize and settle payment transactions in real-time via the Tribute Software System and TrulinX Software. For more information regarding cyber security visit the National Cyber Security Alliance's website StaySafeOnline.org.