With the digital business environment falling victim to breaches and hacks every day, it is now more important than ever to protect your business operations by ensuring safety for customer data.
Remember the data breach at Target that exposed debit and credit card details of more than 40 million customers? Not much later, FBI found out that there were at least twenty similar cases in the same year.
This is why if you process customer payments over the internet, it is essential for you to comply with the latest PCI regulations and standards.
But how do you become compliant? While the latest DDS is available on the regulatory authority’s website, there are many companies still encounter compliance failure.
Here a few mistakes making which may lead to failure in PCI compliance audits.
Network Segmentation
Most business owners don’t realise this but PCI allows segmentation of internal network environments into different silo segments.
Majority of Qualified Security Assessors will advise setting up a PCI only segment that runs only PCI related devices and applications. Simply put, if you separate the PCI components into a segmented silo, you may not need to employ PCI controls across your entire IT network. If you fail to segment your network this way, you may find that low level security parameters lead to PCI non-compliance.
Data Encryption
Since credit and debit card details are constantly in transit from one network to another in order to process payments, this transition is perhaps the most attractive for hackers to breach. This is PCI focuses on implementing stringent encryption for credit card details in transit.
Strong encryption makes the data practically useless when in transit. This is because the complex nature of encryptions require a special key to decrypt, which is only available with you.
Failure to implement the right degree of encryption will always lead to PCI non-compliance.
Basic Configurations
Most of PCI’s configuration instructions are relatively easy to implement across Unix, Windows and other operating systems. However, don’t be dinged for the smaller details.
To stay on the safe side—make sure your company practices basics like default system access set to ‘deny all’, audit logging and stringent password requirements. The passwords should include expiries, length specifications, complexity ratings and all these setting should be in line with PCI’s regulatory guidelines.
Even though you might find this list intimidating, but it is quite easy to implement. Most importantly, all of this is only to help you safeguard your customer’s data and instil a sense of confidence in their behaviour when buying from you.
As the leading provider of penetration testing services, we have been at the forefront of the ecommerce industry, helping a diverse array of clients become PCI compliant. Get in touch to learn more about how PCI compliance works and how our web vulnerability scanner makes things easier and safer for your company.