Visa, Mastercard Joining Forces To Make Internet Shopping Safer

The Internet global computer network could become the world’s biggest shopping bazaar if Visa and Mastercard get their way.

The two leading purveyors of plastic said Friday that they’ve joined forces to devise technical standards that would make credit card purchases over the Internet safe from cyber-thieves.

The agreement should help remove one of the biggest obstacles to the growth of electronic commerce: lack of security.

Visa and MasterCard say consumers want to buy goods on the Internet using plastic, and merchants are eager to sell their wares to legions of young, technically savvy shoppers.

But few people now think it’s safe to put credit card numbers on the Internet - a public electronic network that links thousands of computers worldwide. Criminals with sophisticated knowledge of computer codes could purloin the numbers.

Visa and MasterCard intend to create a common system for shielding credit card numbers and other sensitive data in special security codes that are difficult to decipher.

Consumers shopping via computer would transmit the codes, not the credit card numbers. Software for Internet shopping should be available early next year, executives said.

“There are significant roadblocks to electronic commerce that will be eliminated by this announcement,” said Richard Lonergan, executive vice president at Visa.

San Francisco-based Visa and New York-based MasterCard, both owned by groups of banks, had been developing their own security measures for Internet shopping. Though fierce competitors in recruiting customers, both decided it made sense to support one anti-theft system.

Visa and MasterCard will support technical standards based on encryption codes - long strings of numbers that essentially hide sensitive data - developed by RSA Data Security Inc. of Redwood City, Calif.

RSA’s codes can be 200 to 300 digits long. It could take months or even years of work on a personal computer to crack a code, so RSA’s technology is considered the unofficial standard for data security.