PCI Compliance – Get to About Its 6 Core Goals
There are several Cyber attackers sitting on the web who are looking for only one chance to attempt Cyber threat during the online purchase. E-commerce websites and payment gateways are major targets for the hackers. To be safe from these hacker’s eyes, organizations have to implement and maintain PCI Compliance (or Payment Card Industry Compliance). This post is all about this compliance along with the description of goals to be achieved by each and every organization.
What is PCI Compliance?
In simple words, the process of protecting online payments is known as Payment Card Industry. In the year 2006, JCB International, Discover, American Express, Visa Inc. and MasterCard founded the PCI SSC (Security Standards Council). The purpose of these standards was to develop a comprehensive and acquire a set of standards to secure the payment systems online. The PCI compliance is applied to organizations of all size who attempts web credit card payments. If your firm is deciding to use card payments and, save, access, and transmit cardholder data, you have to host the entire records with a PCI Compliant hosting provider.
12 PCI DSS Compliance Requirements
There are twelve major demands in six core goals for achieving this PCI Compliance. It is compulsory for a vendor to complete the following listed tasks because it is the part of PCI compliance checklist:
Goal 1 – Design And Maintain A Secure Network
- Install and Maintain A Firewall Configuration – Organizations have to program their own policy configuration of the firewall. After this, they need to check the configuration test procedure that is purposely designed to secure the cardholder records. Here, the role of hosting provider should be to locate all firewalls on accurate places to protect and hence, create a secure & private network.
- Do Not Make Use of Vendor-supplied Defaults – This PCI compliance goal states the creation, maintenance, and updation of your machine password with unique security text. Instead of the software vendor, this unique text will be created by the organization’s higher authority.
Goal 2 – Protect the Cardholder Data
- Protect the Stored Information – The organizations that are storing cardholder information on their business cloud, have to achieve this goal. It is essential for a hosting provider of PCI compliant to render several defense layers and provide security to the data protection model, which consolidates virtual and physical security approaches. The virtual security comprises of passwords, authentication, authorization, etc. Physical security comprises of networking cabinet locks, restricted access, and server, etc.
- Encrypt the Cardholder’s Data Transmission – This PCI SSC Compliance says that a system intruder will be incapable of reading encrypted data without the original cryptographic keys. The process of converting plain text into the cipher text requires cryptographic keys. A Cipher text comprises of non-understandable content for those who are not having the keys or an algorithm to decode it.
Goal 3 – Hold the Vulnerability Management Program
- Utilize and Update the Anti-virus Product – Frequent updation in the anti-virus software, which is installed in your PCs or laptops, is required. This is done for prevention against the trending Cyberattacks in the web market. If your records are being hosted on the outsourced server then, managed service provider is having duty of maintaining a secure environment along with the audit logs.
- Create and Maintain Secure Services & Apps – This goal of PCI Compliance comprises of discovery of new identification security vulnerabilities through alert machines. The hosting provider of PCI compliant should be updating and monitoring their services and products regularly for accommodation of security vulnerabilities.
Goal 4 – Use Strong Access Control Approaches
- Limit Down the Access of Cardholder Information – Business authorities should not allow all employees to work with cardholder information. First, they should determine a trustworthy person for that and then only provide the access. If the individual selection goes wrong then, it might lead the security breach of customer’s card information.
- Use a Unique ID of Each Person with PC Access – Users profile with access should comply the best practices that include authorization, password encryption, password updation in every one month, time restriction on login, etc.
- Restrict the Physical Data Access of Cardholders – Suppose that your information is hosted on an off-site data center. In this case, your data center provider should limit down the personnel with accessing of business confidential information. The PCI compliant data centers must be having CCTV cameras and only countable officials should be allowed for entry.
Goal 5 – Regularly Monitor And test Network
- Track And Monitor the Network Resources – The logging machines, which track the user activity and stored the archives could help the hosting provider to pinpoint the reason for the occurrence of security breach incidents.
- Timely Test the Security Processes And Systems – The data hosting provider is responsible for assuring that customer’s credit card information will be safe all the time. This requires for the monthly checking and updates in the cloud information security processes and machines.
Goal 6 – Regularly Monitor And test Network
This PCI Compliance goal ‘maintains a policy, which addresses data security’. It should be having all the reviews and total processes for risk analysis, acceptable technology uses, operational security tasks, and other tasks of administrators.
CloudCodes Help You In Achieving All PCI Compliance
In order to stay safe from headaches of online data security, organizations can choose a CASB solution provider. There are several vendors who render this service and help organizational customers in easily achieving the all PCI SSC roles. Among all providers, one of the best vendors is CloudCodes. This is a CASB solution with complete package of online security solutions. Ranging from DLP to Mobile management devices, from PCI to GDPR policy implementation, all things are included in this CASB provider. Organizations can go for this approach to access cardholders information in a secure manner.