Monday, February 08, 2021

PCI DSS: What Is It and Why Is It a Must for Every Business?

PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) is the data security standard of the payment card industry. In other words, it is documentation with a list of criteria that a service must satisfy if it somehow controls things such as card number, expiration date, and CVV code. There are quite a few payment cards (everyone knows Visa and MasterCard), and since this is an industry-standard, it would be useful for all companies to agree among themselves on what they will consider safe. You can spend less time meeting PCI compliance requirements with expert assistance. Professional companies will help you to become a PCI compliant within a week or so and enjoy a hassle-free procedure.

What Exactly Is Being Checked?

It will be difficult to describe all the verification criteria - there are 288 of them. The procedure itself is quite lengthy because it involves the verification of several difficult technical points.

All relationships and responsibilities within the framework of PCI DSS requirements between service providers, namely between the processing center and the data center, as well as acquiring banks, are recorded in the so-called responsibility matrices. The presence of signed responsibility matrices between service providers has become a mandatory requirement since version 3.1 of the PCI DSS standard. Among other things, of course, the data center must also have an up-to-date PCI DSS certificate of conformity for the infrastructure components that the processing center uses - virtualization, services, physical equipment, and so on.

PCI DSS for Virtual Cards

When building a business process for issuing, transferring, and destroying virtual cards, first of all, you need to take care of protecting your data from leakage or theft. To do this, several conditions must be met:

  • The card number must be encrypted when stored in banking systems and mobile applications;
  • When displaying the card number on the screens of the client, cashier, bank operators, as well as when printing on checks and receipts, it must be masked. This means that the symbols of numbers 7 through 12 should be replaced with asterisks, crosses, or other signs that hide the real number;
  • It is forbidden to store the CVV2 verification code in any banking system or application. After creating the CVV2 code, this usually happens at the time the card is issued, it must be transferred to the client. After that, information about CVV2 should be deleted from the bank's systems. The client himself must take care of the safe storage or memorization of this number;
  • Only encrypted connections should be used to exchange card data between the bank, the client, and the merchant. For example, it is forbidden to send a card number or CVV2 via SMS.

These are the basic requirements for virtual cards and protect against data leakage or theft. It is important to remember that even the fulfillment of all requirements does not give a 100% security guarantee.