All companies that manage, keep, or transfer cardholder data or others with the potential to impact the protection of cardholder data as it is handled, maintained, or sent are subject to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, or PCI DSS.
Every year, adherence to the PCI DSS is required to be evaluated. An impartial qualified security assessor company, or QSAC, must determine the compliance of organisations handling high volumes of transactions, which are above 6 million per card brand for merchants and 300,000 for service providers, leading to a report on compliance, or ROC. Self-assessment questionnaires, or SAQs, are an option for organisations managing lesser quantities to demonstrate compliance.
What is a PCI DSS audit?
A PCI DSS audit thoroughly examines a merchant’s compliance with PCI DSS requirements. It includes a number containing considerable personal controls or safeguards for securing cardholder information, such as the Primary Account Number, CAV, CID, CVC2, CVV2, and different types, as well as systems that interact with fee processing.
PCI audits are created to carefully examine whether or not your company handles PCI controls, which are security measures set up to protect all systems involved in credit card processing. Retailers and service providers specifically need to safeguard the following:
- Read cards
- Point-of-sale devices
- Maintaining wireless access points and network routers
- Storage and transfer of credit card information
- Paper-based documents, including payment card information
- Applications for online payments and gift cards
What is the process of a PCI audit?
Preparing for your PCI audit begins with scoping, which defines the evaluation criteria for your impending audit.Every place and process where cardholder data is used by your corporation must be identified.It is always a good idea to scope all systems annually before conducting an assessment. It is your responsibility to limit the scope of your review in advance. This is because, unless specified otherwise, auditors come prepared to look at all system operations.
Is a PCI audit required for companies to show compliance?
It is contingent upon the standards of your preferred transaction provider and your company’s standing as a merchant. Under the type of merchant, PCI DSS established four levels of compliance. The four tiers, which also include compliance standards, are as follows:
PCI Merchant Level 1
Any businesses that process more than 6 million transactions annually across all channels or any merchant with a data breach are considered to be at PCI Merchant Level 1. Annual network scans by a certified scanning vendor and third-party audits to confirm compliance are required of Level 1 enterprises.
PCI Merchant Level 2
Those who fall under PCI Merchant Level 2 process between 1 million and 6 million transactions annually across every medium. All merchants on Levels 2 through 4 must complete a PCI DSS self-assessment questionnaire, and the senior management team must approve it
for the business. Quarterly network scans by authorised scanning vendors are also in demand.
PCI Merchant Level 3
Level 3 PCI merchants conduct between 20,000 and 1 million online transactions annually.
PCI Merchant Level 4
Level 4 includes any business processing up to 1 million in-person transactions per year or less than 20,000 online transactions annually.
Scope of the Audit
An essential step to successfully passing a PCI audit is scoping your Cardholder Data Environment to identify all locations and workflows of cardholder data within. This must be completed annually prior to any assessment as auditors will assess any processes they find within your network.
Care must be taken in identifying your Cardholder Data Environment (CDE). This involves all people, processes and technologies that store, process or transmit cardholder data. All systems connected with your CDE, including third parties and service providers that store, process or transmit this data should also be defined – these in-scope systems require stringent security controls and must adhere to stringent controls.
Avoid unneeded storage of cardholder data with tokenization, which converts actual payment information into an algorithmically generated series of letters and numbers for easier PCI audits. Segmentation also can help reduce scope by physically or electronically segregating systems that handle card data from those that do not, thus reducing security controls needed and making audits simpler to complete.
Security Policy
PCI requires that any activity dealing with sensitive data must be logged and access controlled using software products that only permit certain roles to gain entry. While this step of compliance can be time-consuming and expensive, using an efficient GRC product can make this task much simpler.
Segmenting your data can make PCI audits less stressful. Separating cardholder environment data (CHD) from regular company information reduces the number of systems your auditor needs to review, while encrypting CHD at rest further reduces work that must be performed during an audit.
If your business processes 1-6 million transactions annually, a QSA-led audit and Report on Compliance (RoC) are mandatory. Level two merchants will need to complete and sign off on an SAQ while conducting quarterly network scans with approved scanning vendors to stay compliant. Maintaining PCI compliance requires regular oversight of data security systems, policies, and procedures in place at every level of business activity.
Risk Assessment
Risk assessments are an integral component of PCI DSS audits, including vulnerability scans, penetration testing, gap analysis and all related analyses. When performing risk evaluations for your audit it’s vital to keep detailed records documenting precautions taken and any risks discovered during evaluations. It’s also crucial that any personnel granted access to cardholder data only have it granted on an as-needed basis to limit exposure of sensitive information while increasing response times if any breaches arise.
PCI DSS 4.0 elevates risk assessment from mere compliance duty to an essential component of overall security infrastructure. To comply with its new compliance framework, risk management procedures will have to be documented so they can gauge other controls; more comprehensive, formal risk analyses than ever will need to be performed, but doing so will protect businesses against financial losses caused by data breaches.
Network Diagrams
Maintaining comprehensive network diagrams is crucial, as they enable an assessor to quickly locate all systems under consideration for inspection. This reduces the risk of misapplication of requirements by both assessor and entity under inspection.
These network diagrams should provide both an overall picture of the environment (10,000 foot view) and detailed views of certain parts of it (such as specific parts of an organization). These network diagrams must clearly display cardholder data flow as well as network connections affecting it; doing an online search with keywords “enterprise network diagram examples” will yield many helpful resources for documenting your specific environment.
Document creation can be time-consuming and laborious, but programs like Lucidchart can make the task simpler and faster. With custom shape libraries for Cisco networks, AWS environments, Microsoft Azure environments and general network infrastructure available on this tool – plus professional templates designed specifically to keep documentation updated – Lucidchart makes creating these documents much simpler than it once was!
