Exhaustive PCI compliance checklist

If you are a merchant, it is important that you must know PCI compliance checklist in order to avoid fines. PCI is an acronym for Payment Card Industry and is used for five giant payment processors: MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Vis and Japanese Credit Bureau. These five providers have agreements with issuing banks across the world and bank on behalf of them, issue credit and debit card worldwide.

When PCI needs compliance to its security standard which is also known was PCI data security standard, then banks will be following the same and place PCI DSS requirements in merchant agreement and all the merchants who want POS terminals should be complying it. In case, security breach takes place due to PCI noncompliance then a large fine is imposed on the bank. Bank then passes these fines on its merchants or providers who provide online services. Thus, it is important for merchants to have a thorough knowledge of PCI compliance checklist and they should be complaining to it in order to avoid any penalty imposed by their issuing bank.

Following is the PCI compliance checklist and compliance to it earns you certification of PCI DSS.

You should be maintaining firewalled and secured networks. All the traffic needs to be encrypted and unauthorized access should be denied. The traffic encompass digital traffic, onsite staff browsers, emails, wireless web, from internet, person-to-person network and many other forms.

Retaining card holder data securely: It is absolute must for business purposes that all the data related to card like card number which is stored on merchant’s computer should be done by encryption. This will render card data useless in case of hacking. Without having right security key, the intruder will not be able to correctly decrypt the data.

Transmitting encrypted data of card holder over public networks which he submits it. This may include wrongly configured wireless networks or badly configured one. When data is encrypted, it can’t be read correctly when it is transmitted over public network.

Ongoing maintenance of vulnerability assessment procedures: The merchant has to keep all this software up to date, so that it has no known security loopholes which hackers can exploit. A state of art antivirus must be installed on house and the application development should be complying with standard secured programming practices.

Thus, this was basic PCI compliance checklist which every merchant should comply to. When you comply with PCI compliance checklist, chances of avoiding fines related to PCI improve dramatically.
http://www.worldpay.us/247/pci-about-req.htm issued PCI compliance checklist that will help to avoid unnecessary fines.

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