PCI: DSS Testing & Maintenance
The fundamentals for merchants to maintain compliance
A critical aspect of PCI: DSS compliance involves completing regular Vulnerability Assessments and Penetration Tests. SES Penetration Testing consultants can provide your organisation with in-depth technical testing as required by the standard, including Internal Vulnerability Assessments, Internal and External Penetration Testing and Segmentation Testing.
Unfortunately, it is easy for organisations to lapse their PCI: DSS compliance after an initial effort, simply by not embedding controls into ‘business as usual’ processes.
To combat this, SES strongly advises that organisation carry out quarterly assessments for key controls and processes to ensure that your organisation remains compliant at your annual re-attestation.
Benefits of PCI: DSS testing & maintenance
Sustain your compliance posture by embedding PCI: DSS requirements into ongoing activities and test these regularly with information assurance experts.
Regular PCI: DSS testing ensures that any new processes, systems or tools implemented by your business concerning the handling of payment data meet the six fundamental goals of the standard.
The six fundamental goals are:
Secure network & systems
Protection of data
Vulnerability management
Effective access control
Regular monitoring
Updating security policies
Clients we've helped
Our expertise. Your questions answered
What’s the easiest thing to implement in my office?
There are many controls every organisation should put in place to ensure good defence against cyber threat - from the basics like using anti-virus, email filters and firewalls, to more in-depth activities, like Penetration Testing and Phishing Assessments. One of the basic controls you can implement easily in both your professional and personal lives is good password hygiene. In some cases, your password is often the only thing keeping cyber criminals away from your sensitive information; length is the primary factor when creating a strong password—the longer it is, the more guesses will be needed by hackers to get it right.
Am I investing my Cyber Security budget correctly?
You could take a blanket approach and cover every possibility, but that’s an expensive strategy and your Finance Manager or CFO probably wouldn’t be happy to spend money unnecessarily. Every business faces different threats, so what the organisation in the next office needs to defend against isn’t necessarily what you need to invest in. It’s important to get an understanding of your threat profile and align that with the risks you’re willing to take (or not take). From there, you can decide what you should be investing in.
How do I educate my team to handle cyber threats?
The cyber threat is ever-changing and even with the best technical defences in place, the end-users (i.e. humans) are usually the weakest link. That is not to say that cyber security should only be non-technical, but it is important to have the right balance. Knowing where to start for cyber security generally can be difficult and working out what your team needs to know is a bit overwhelming. Like knowing where to invest your budget, how you train your team also starts with understanding your specific threats.
What do I do when something goes wrong?
Frustratingly, you’ve put in place all these useful security controls, but with the threats changing so often, keeping up can be hard. Therefore, it’s important to have the mindset that, it’s not about if you get breached, it’s about when you get breached and then how you handle it. Having a plan in place will ensure the consequences of a breach don’t undo of all your hard work in developing your organisation and building your reputation.