Credit-Card Data Breaches Drive Security Solutions

4foot10 writes with a link to a CRN article about the booming business of PCI adoption. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) was worked out by credit card companies as a guideline for securing customer data. As a series of high-profile customer information leaks have occurred over the last year, the business is increasingly getting lucrative for those who can keep up. "As PCI-related business begins to boom, security VARs and integrators find themselves in the enviable position of having almost too much work to handle. And there's plenty of room for the market to grow: Visa estimates that just 36 percent of Level 1 merchants (which process more than 6 million credit-card transactions annually) and 15 percent of Level 2 merchants (which process at least 1 million) have complied with PCI. Solution providers can either handle PCI-related assessments of companies' networks and then recommend solutions to address holes, or provide the remediation services after an audit, which often requires companies to implement firewalls or encryption to their networks."

Comments

Putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound

[Dachannien]

Instead of coming up with all these technological countermeasures, why don't the credit card agencies simply stop offering credit without actually verifying the identity of the credit requestor? Make the data useless by itself, and people will stop trying to obtain it.

Oh, that's right, it's more lucrative to give out credit like candy, and then put responsibility for fraudulent charges on the merchants.

Re:Putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound

[jd3nn1s]

The PCI DSS has nothing to do with stopping fraudulent credit applications. It's about making sure that payment information you have given to a merchant is protected from security breaches. The merchant is rightly responsible for this.

layers 1-3 aren't the biggest problem

[bl8n8r]

The biggest problems facing internet security are greed, laziness, ineptitude, apathy and general ignorance. expensive credit card hardware cant fix pebkac, all it does is make newegg raise their shipping charges.