Goizueta Business School’s Ram Chellappa, Associate Professor of Information Systems and Operations Management, sat down with The Wall Street Journal earlier this week to discuss cyber security issues. The most recent firm attacked, J.P. Morgan Chase, [highlight] resulted in compromised customer information including names and addresses[/highlight].
Chellappa said consumers affected likely won’t need to change passwords or have new debit or credit cards issued. However, they should be on the lookout for scams related to stolen contact information.
“When this type of information is hacked into, it’s a tool that can be used in phishing,” Chellappa told Sara Murray via Skype. “So it is of concern…”
Phishing occurs when hackers — or those who receive stolen data — contact the customer and pose as the financial institution. They try to obtain more information by looking or sounding “official.”
“If someone does have access to this information, they may think it’s some legit party,” Chellappa said.
What Chellappa is concerned about and continuing to examine is ongoing liability.
“For continued success of electronic commerce and online banking and financial transaction, the liabilities for any kind of impropriety that may happen has to rest with the [organization] and the people who actually store your information,” he said. “They know in the long term it’s going to affect them more than anything else. They need to take all steps possible to ensure trust is not lost on the part of the consumer.”
Chellappa said companies can better protect data by introducing multi-factor logins. In this scenario, the consumer inputs a password but has an additional code sent to a mobile device to complete the login process.
About Ramnath Chellappa
Dr. Ramnath K. Chellappa is an Associate Professor of Information Systems & Operations Management and the Caldwell Research Fellow at the Goizueta Business School, Emory University. He serves as the area’s Doctoral Coordinator. He is also the SRITNE Distinguished Academic Fellow at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad.
Prof. Chellappa joined the Goizueta Business School faculty in Fall 2005. He served on the faculty of Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California from 1997 – 2005, and was also the founding director of the Electronic Economy Research Lab (eBizLab) at USC. He has been affiliated with the Center for Telecom Management at USC and the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas at Austin.
Prof. Chellappa’s expertise is in the field of electronic markets, pricing, digital goods and economics of information security and privacy. His research in the areas of digital product piracy has been widely published in leading journals and conferences. His work on information privacy, and decline of music sales has received best paper awards in premier conferences. His recent works examine pricing in the US domestic airline industry, competitive dynamics in business software industries and digitization in the entertainment industry. His research methods include analytical modeling, empirical modeling and social network analysis.
