If your business uses BACS for salary payments or indeed other payment services, then you need to be aware of a looming deadline which will see the system upping its levels of security and encryption standards.
As of June 13 this year, BACS services will only support TLS 1.1/1.2, and will require SHA-2 certificates. Support for older security protocols is being withdrawn.
Therefore SMBs have to make sure that their systems move with the times, or they'll be unable to use BACS payments any longer. And businesses really should look into taking action now, as there's less than four months to go before the deadline hits.
Wolfgang Kandek, CTO at Qualys, commented: "For companies that rely on BACS, this shift should not have too much impact on them, but it is worth checking that your payment systems support SHA-2 SSL certificates and the TLS 1.1/1.2 standards. If your current applications don't support the appropriate versions of TLS, then an update will be required."
Talk it over
Kandek further advises that if you use a service provider for BACS payments, you should contact them and talk over this issue, making sure they're going to support the new standards before the June 13 deadline.
He adds: "If you use the online services provided by BACS, then your web browser and apps should also support SHA-2 – the most recent versions of IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari all include this as default. For companies running older versions of IE, changes may be necessary in order to add support."
Note, of course, that older versions of Internet Explorer are no longer supported by Microsoft as of last month, with Redmond urging any IE users to update to IE11 or face major security risks.
For further information on the BACS security transition, check out this web page.
