Skip to main content

NETELLER - Privacy and security design flaw

Yesterday, colleague of mine brought to my notice about a payment system called NETELLER and it's merchant API named NETELLER Direct API V4.

This NETELLER Direct API V4, helps the merchant to collect amount from users. It's simple--same just like early Authorize.net, along with the required amount you collect the user's id and password and post them to their API URL and they'll send you back with success or error codes in XML format.

The major problem with these types of system is security and privacy--you lose both as you're forced to type your username and password in alien web page. If I remember right, this is was the case with Authorize.net and they changed their design to something like PayPal. The PayPal design is somewhat better as you never type or forced to type your username and password in other alien web pages.

The alien merchant web page uses NETELLER Direct API V4 is forced to get user's NETELLER account and password. I'm much sure that the alien website will obviously store such info--but what if they tried to access user's NETELLER account?

The funniest part of this NETELLER design is that they call it more secure and in their security page they advice "Never share your NETELLER Password or Secure ID with anyone. You will never be asked to disclose your password or Secure ID by a NETELLER representative or anyone affiliated with NETELLER."

Beware of NETTELLER!--until they fix their design flaw.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Converting PSD with PHP/ImageMagick

After seeing feature rich options in Imagick PECL extension at Mikko Koppanen 's (the author) website and also impressed with ImageMagick 's features, I have decided to use it for the PSD to XHTML conversion website that I'm architecting and managing. Since, the team wants programming help for converting PSD images, I have tried it (documentation is sparse on PSD handling) Converting PSD to PNG/JPEG/etc Note that, flattenImages() is needed for layered/multi-page PSD file. <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->flattenImages(); $im->setImageFormat('png'); $im->writeImage('test.png'); ?> Extracting PSD layers One by one <?php $im = new Imagick('test.psd'); $im->setImageFormat('png'); for ($i = 0, $num_layers = $im->getNumberImages(); $i $im->setImageIndex($i); $im->writeImage('layer' . $i . '.png'); } ?> Note that, there is a better version below In a single call with writeIm...

I'm Zend (PHP 5) Certified Engineer:-)

As of January 13, 2007, I'm ZCE/ Zend Certified Engineer (PHP 5)

Tim Van Wassenhove's (PHP) Blogmarks

Tim Van Wassenhove , a c.l.php regular maintains wonderful blogmarks . Most of the blogs are PHP related and it is faster to access than my Sage, RSS reader . It is interesting to see that Tim has blogmarked my—this simple blog too:) IMHO, it would be better to display timestamps along with the links and to have a TOC of blogs in the top.