Articles In Security

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

The PCI Council published a blog announcing the coming of PCI DSS version 4.0 at the end of March 2022 https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/countdown-to-pci-dss-v4.0. The blog contains a PCI DSS Version 4.0 Implementation timeline. The new standard document, the Summary of Changes v3.2.1 to 4.0 will be released along with the Report on Compliance ROC Template and Attestations of Compliance AOC documents at the end of March 2022. The Self-Assessment Questionnaires SAQs will be available shortly after. Tr... read more.

• March 17, 2022

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

In November, Troy Leach, Senior Vice President, Engagement Officer for the PCI Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), and Suzie Squier, President of the Retail & Hospitality Information Sharing and Analysis Center (RH-ISAC), discussed the protection of payment data during this holiday season.   https://blog.pcisecuritystandards.org/be-on-alert-this-holiday-season In October, the PCI SSC blog focused on their Work from Home Security Awareness Training, which is available from the council.... read more.

• November 29, 2021

By Gotham, Posted in Security

This is a guest blog from Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity company that protects organizations' greatest assets and biggest risks: their people. Today’s organizations face a variety of challenges and security risks, ranging from ransomware to phishing campaigns. For this reason, many organizations invest significant time and resources to detect and prevent external threats. But one area that is often overlooked is the insider threat. There are three primary types of insider threats: Malicious:... read more.

• September 20, 2021

By Gotham, Posted in Security

This is a guest blog from Proofpoint, a leading cybersecurity company that protects organizations' greatest assets and biggest risks: their people. Today’s organizations face a variety of challenges and security risks, ranging from ransomware to phishing campaigns. For this reason, many organizations invest significant time and resources to detect and prevent external threats. But one area that is often overlooked is the insider threat. There are three primary types of insider threats: Malicious:... read more.

• September 20, 2021

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

The PCI Council has published a series of blogs on payment data security as part of their task force for small merchants.  Topics include: Back-to-Basics: Think Before You Click Back-to-Basics: Properly Configured Firewalls Back-to-Basics: Secure Remote Access Back-to-Basics: Use Strong Encryption Back-to-Basics: Keep Software Patched Back-to-Basics: Use Strong Passwords Back-to-Basics: Reduce Where Payment Data Can Be Found PCI SSC Shares Resources for Navigating Changing Payment Environmen... read more.

• September 08, 2021

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

On August 5, 2021, the PCI DSS Council and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) issued a joint statement on the importance of cloud scoping. https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/about_us/press_releases/pr_08052021 https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/pdfs/PCI_Cloud_Security_Alliance_Cloud_Bulletin.pdf Best practices focus areas are discussed: Data protection, Authentication, Systems management, DevOps & DevSecOps, Data governance and Resiliency. These best practices are important to the security of clou... read more.

• September 02, 2021

By Ed Bratter, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

One of the benefits of Microsoft 365 is the ability for users to collaborate and share with co-workers, clients, vendors, partners, and people external to the organization. This benefit, however, comes with a downside; users can either purposely or inadvertently expose information that the organization would not want shared externally.   To complicate matters, newly established tenants leave the door wide-open for publishing data to external entities. As a result, users can share data with outside ind... read more.

• July 27, 2021

By Timothy Karl, Posted in Infrastructure, Security

With anti-malware scanning software it is very important to have the proper malware exclusions in place. A misconfiguration of these settings may lead to performance issues which can may cause outages of critical applications and services due to file contention and locking. IT administrators need to find a balance between a malware-free environment and affecting the reliability and performance of any applications or services. Anti-malware exclusions can come from a variety of sources. Each anti-malwar... read more.

• July 02, 2021

By Ken Phelan, Posted in Security

In response to a growing number of serious cyber threats and incidents, President Biden has issued an Executive Order (EO) regarding improving the nation’s cybersecurity. I don’t personally read a lot of EOs, but I read this one, and if you’re part of the cyber industry, you probably should too. Given that you probably won’t, I’ll do some summarizing for you. There’s stuff about cooperation and standards, but I’d like to draw your attention to the EO’s requir... read more.

• May 24, 2021

By Nancy Rand, Posted in Security

The PCI Security Standards Council, PCI SSC, published a new version of the Secure Software Standard and its supporting program documentation on 4/29/2021. https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/about_us/press_releases/pr_04292021 This version includes a new Terminal Software Module that contains requirements for software used on PCI-approved PIN Transaction Security (PTS) Point-of-Interaction (POI) devices. There are currently two other modules in this Standard: The “Core” module that contai... read more.

• May 18, 2021