Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

Writing by Chakri on Monday, 16 of February, 2009 at 11:28 am

The exponential growth of online transactions with credit and debit cards, though has facilitated the process, but has made itself susceptible to insecurity; it has opened the gateway to greater and devastating security risks. Thus emerged the need of curbing this issue with a set of security standards which is known as the PCCI DSS, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), created by the major credit card companies, intending to protect their customers from increasing identity theft and security breaches.

Virtually all businesses, regardless of their size, need to understand the scope of PCI DSS, and ways to implement network security that is compliant with PCI DSS guidelines. In doing so, they will avoid penalties or the possibility of having their merchant status revoked and potentially being banned from accepting or processing credit cards.
AppLabs, an independent software company, is such a service provider, which is compliant with PCI DSS guidelines and satisfies the PCI DSS requirements, which include security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and other critical protective measures. This comprehensive standard is intended to help organizations to proactively protect customer account data.

For the compliance process of PCI DSS, a multifaceted security standard, AppLabs conducts an annual onsite PCI and sometimes a Self-Assessment Questionnaire (SAQ), which is filled in to validate the compliance. In addition to this, AppLabs scans the network perimeter by an Approved Scanning Vendor (ASV) every quarter, submits the report and hence highlights the compliance status, network vulnerabilities and vulnerable services classified as per the scoring pattern and severities prescribed by PCI DSS. The evidences of these and  the application and network penetration tests are shared with card brands, hence proving that that AppLabs’ practices sound patch management and vulnerability management processes.

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Category: Compliance Testing, PCI Data Security Standard