Visa is pushing ecommerce merchants to adopt the security rules created back in May by credit card companies by offering both rewards and fines, according to CNET. The fines will actually fall on banks if their merchants don’t follow the security rules created by Visa and Mastercard, but banks are expected to pass these fines on. Interestingly, the article specifies that the rewards “are available to transaction service providers that deal with the largest 1,200 merchants” but doesn’t specify whether the fines are limited in scope.

The rules main aim is to ensure that ecommerce stores are securely storing credit card data using firewalls, encryption and most hilarious, not using default passwords. I find the idea that you could access Target’s admin panel using the username: admin and password: admin to be ridiculous, but Visa thinks it’s a problem. Visa thinks it’s so much of a problem that they sent out $4.6 million in fines in 2006. The moral of this story; make sure you securely store your customers’ information.