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

Zac Brown Band rocks...

When I was doing UG, my super-senior friend Ronald introduced me to MLTR and I was totally taken away by the music then. About 15-years later, I'm feeling same ecstasy when listening to Zac Brown Band 's Whatever It Is and Highway 20 Ride . The voice and music are amazingly cool.

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிà®´் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...

Work avoiders on the rise

roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes --  80–20 rule / Pareto principle One popular store (that is known for its less selling price, 6-storied air-conditioned showroom) is situated to close to our home. But, Heleena is allergic to it. Reason? Even though there are at least 50 sales people per floor, only 1 or 2 people will be working and responding to the customers' queries. In another shop, I even noticed that the owner was serving customer when many staffs were cleverly avoiding the show! I'm finding the same problem everywhere. Who're affected here? Obviously the people who're actually working--they will have to handle more work that the clever people have avoided. Two common gestures/characteristics I have noted in these clever people: 1. They'll pretend to be absolute ignorant (These people's agenda are merely to avoid works, but not to take credits.), 2. They'll create politics on anything (These people's agenda ar...