With the expansion in the usage of stolen credit card details for purchases and transactions on the internet, the PCI Standards committee set up the PCI compliance or payment card industry as a standard requirement that all online organizations should observe when managing credit cards online.
The approved scanning vendor (ASV) is tasked with the responsibility of testing web servers for PCI compliance and is expected to scan and examine your business website as required. These ASV’s run a huge number of robotized security tests that can’t be done physically by people.
As credit card organizations become more resolved to stop credit card theft and fraud, it has become imperative to force entrepreneurs to keep up secure frameworks and utilize more secure practices when handling credit card payments on their platforms, and the ASV is required to check such practices.
It’s worth noting that the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) applies to organizations of any size that acknowledge credit card payments. If your organization hopes to accept card payments or store, process, and transmit cardholder data, you need to secure your data with a PCI compliant hosting provider.
What are the goals and aims of PCI compliance?
Goal 1: Building and Managing A Secured framework
Introduce and keep a firewall design to secure cardholder data. Organizations should make their firewall setup strategy and build up an arrangement test system to ensure cardholder data. Your hosting provider should also have firewalls set up to ensure your network is safe and private.
Try not to utilize merchant provided defaults for framework passwords and other security boundaries. This implies making, keeping up, and refreshing your framework passwords with novel and secure passwords made by your organization, not the ones that a product seller may have set up upon purchase.
Goal 2: Protect Cardholder Data
Protected Stored data. This only applies to organizations that store cardholder data. For organizations that don’t naturally store cardholder data, it is safe to say that they are ‘protected’ from potential client data security breaks frequently carried out by identity theft propagators. A PCI compliant hosting server should give numerous security layers and a data security insurance model that consolidates physical and virtual security techniques. Virtual security incorporates approval, verification, passwords, and so on, while physical incorporates servers, restricted access, storage, and systems cabinet locks.
Encrypted transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks. Based on the PCI Security Standards Council, scrambled data is incoherent and unusable to a framework intruder without the property cryptographic keys. Cryptographic keys, in this sense, refers to how plaintexts are changed into ciphertext. Ciphertext contains data unidentifiable to those without the code or the particular calculation that can decipher the text. As an additional security measure, sensitive verification data, including card approval codes or PINs, should never be put away after approval – regardless of whether this data is encrypted.
Goal 3: Maintain a Vulnerability Management Program.
Ensure to install and consistently update your antivirus program. An antivirus program should be updated continuously to ensure that your systems are secured against recently created malware and viruses. If your data is being facilitated through outsourced servers, a server manager is answerable for keeping a protected environment, including producing audit logs.
Create and keep up secure frameworks and applications. This includes finding recently recognized security weaknesses through alert systems frameworks. Your PCI compliant facilitating provider should continually screen and refresh their frameworks to identify and treat any security weaknesses.
Goal 4: Implement Strong Access Control Measures
Restricted admittance to cardholder data through business need-to-know only access. Restricting the quantity of staff with access to cardholder data will reduce the odds of a security loophole.
Allocate a different ID to every individual with access to systems data. User accounts with access to secure data must follow best industry practices, which include: secret key encryption, authorization, verification, password refresh periodically, sign in time restrictions, and so forth.
Limit physical access to cardholder data. If your data service provider facility is outsourced, your data center provider needs to have restricted staff access to the sensitive data. PCI compliant data centers ought to have round the clock surveillance, including security cameras and authentication of entry to guarantee a protected and PCI compliant facilitating environment.
Goal 5: Implement Strong Access Control Measures
Track and screen all admittance to network assets and cardholder data. Logging frameworks that track client movement and put away documents can help your hosting provider pinpoint the cause of any security issue.
Routinely test security frameworks and cycles. With systemized checking and testing measures set up, your data hosting provider can always guarantee that your clients’ cardholder data is protected consistently.
Goal 6: Maintain an Information Security Policy
Keep an arrangement that tends to data security. This arrangement should incorporate industry-standard technology, reviews, yearly cycles of risks examination, operational security procedures, and other general regulatory assignments.
