Regulation: Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard
Abbreviation: PCI DSS
Governs these parties: any business that accepts card payments,
including seasonal or small businesses
Enforced by: Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, JCB, and Discover
PCI (or payment card industry) compliance is the set of policies and procedures developed to protect credit, debit, and cash card transactions and prevent the misuse of cardholders' personal information.
Any business that transmits, stores, handles or accepts credit card data need to be defended against ransomware, exploits, and adversaries. In order to comply with PCI DSS, you should restrict access to stored cardholder data, and secure, track and monitor access to network resources with encrypted transmissions.
The rest of this document is designed to help our community understand PCI DSS better by outlining the following information:
How it relates to cybersecurity
PCI compliance refers to a set of 12 security standards that businesses must use when accepting, transmitting, processing, and storing credit card data:
- Install and maintain a firewall, including testing network connections, and restricting connections to untrusted networks.
- Change vendor-supplied default passwords and security settings, including enabling only necessary services, removing functionality where warranted, and encrypting access.
- Protect stored cardholder data, including having policies for disposing of data, limiting what is stored, and avoiding storing certain types of data.
- Encrypt cardholder data when transmitting it across open, public networks.
- Use and regularly update antivirus software, meaning performing and documenting periodic scans, as well as ensuring the software is running.
- Develop security systems and create processes to find and take action on vulnerabilities.
- Restrict access to cardholder data on a need-to-know basis. That requires defining the access certain roles need, as well as creating user privileges and control systems.
- Assign user IDs to everybody with computer access and ensure authentication to users, document their policies in this area.
- Restrict physical access to cardholder data, using monitor tools, or handling certain equipment in sensitive areas of the business.
- Track and monitor who accesses networks and cardholder data. It requires having an audit trail, using time-stamped tracking tools, and reviewing logs for suspicious activity.
- Regularly test systems, processes, and inventory wireless access points do quarterly vulnerability scans and monitor traffic.
- Have a policy on information security at least once a year that lays out usage rules for certain technologies and explains everyone's responsibilities.
How Coro handles compliance for you
At Coro, we've done the research thoroughly and regularly track updates to the regulation in order to ensure that you are implementing best practices in the areas we cover when we're protecting your systems.
The following table outlines the requirements described by PCI DSS that Coro implements in conjunction with Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace.
Disclaimer: this table does not guarantee that your organization is compliant with these regulations. As a best practice, seek assistance from a certified auditor when completing your analysis.
| Category |
Requirement |
How Coro does it |
|
Cloud Security & Privacy
|
Malware and ransomware injection |
Detects malware and ransomware files in cloud drives |
|
Cloud app account takeover |
Monitors access to cloud apps and user/admin activities on them |
|
|
Data governance over cloud drives |
Data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatorily and business-sensitive data |
|
|
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) |
Multi-factor authentication at cloud app access |
|
|
Data Encryption |
Safeguarding stored sensitive information against unauthorized use and leakage |
|
|
Audit and activity logs |
Enables searching & working with all activities across environments |
|
|
Email Security & Privacy
|
Malware and ransomware injection |
Detection of malware and ransomware in email attachments |
|
Identity spoofing |
Detection of social engineering attacks based on adaptive identity monitoring |
|
|
Generic and spear phishing |
Detection of social engineering attacks based on email content analysis |
|
|
Embedded links to malicious URLs |
Detects embedded links to malicious servers |
|
|
DLP over outgoing/incoming email |
Encrypts emails before they are sent, which are then decrypted by their recipients at the other end. |
|
|
Business email compromise (BEC) |
Scans business email, detects and protects against social engineering attacks |
|
|
Email account takeover |
Email attacks from within the organization |
|
|
Encryption of email during transmission |
Email is encrypted during transit between the sender and the recipient |
|
|
Audit and activity logs |
Enables searching & working with all activities across environments |
|
| Endpoint Security & Privacy | Antivirus (AV) |
Detects and remediates files with high-risk content based on their signatures |
| Data recovery | Secures local snapshots of data | |
| DLP on endpoint devices | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for regulatorily and business-sensitive data | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing | |
| Data Governance | Data distribution governance and role management | Provides data loss prevention (DLP) for data defined as sensitive by regulations |
| PCI monitoring | Monitors PCI (payment card industry) payment transaction data and cardholder data | |
| Audit and activity logs | Archives all system activities for a period of seven years, supporting referencing and auditing |