NEW YORK — Detailed reports from the Canadian government and the popular CBS television news program '60 Minutes' have brought the details of card security back to the surface again, just in time for this year's holiday season.

The news program aired a segment focusing on retailer card security vulnerabilities on Nov. 25. During the segment a reporter sat with a computer security expert in a van outside different major retail outlets and demonstrated how–with nothing more than a laptop computer and easily accessible software–he could hack the computer systems of many different retail outlets, all of which were handling customer credit card information.

The story focused as well on the differences between the Wired Equivalent Privacy security protocol for retail wireless networks and the Wi-Fi Protected Access security protocol. It suggested that the WEP protocol could easily be defeated even though it is apparently widely used among retailers. WPA protocol is much harder to defeat but has not been widely implemented due to increased hardware and software costs.