PCI DSS stands for Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard established to enhance payment security processes in terms of cardholder data protection.
PCI compliance means adherence to the 12 data security policies founded by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council to protect cash, credit & debit card transactions and forbid the fraudulent use of the cardholder’s personal data.
If you are an owner of an eCommerce or physical store that accepts and processes cards for payments, regardless of the number and amount of transactions, then you must fulfill PCI DSS requirements.
However, your required level of compliance assessment will be defined by the annual transaction volume (you will fall into one of the 4 merchant levels of compliance). For example, if you are a small-to-medium business, you will be defined as a level-4 merchant.
Here are twelve principal cardholder data security terms:
Depending on the type of eCommerce solution (in-house, outsourced or hybrid), the eCommerce roles are distributed differently to ensure the meeting of PCI requirements:
Insecure coding in eCommerce leads to certain risks and challenges such as: injection flaws of potentially malicious data, cross-site scripting (when an attacker can locate the code in the victim’s browser and redirect them to a fraudulent website), buffer overflows (can change the system configurations, damage or disclose confidential information) and weak credentials for authentification and session (not strong enough passwords or vulnerable browser sessions).
Some other vulnerabilities include security misconfigurations (weak or not changed default passwords, and unconfident settings for remote access).
According to PCI DSS requirements, sensitive authentication data (SAD) cannot be stored after the authentication. As for cardholder information, the security standard says that its storage should be narrowed down to that which is necessary for business, legal or regulatory needs.
BigCommerce, Shopify, Amazon, and eBay are examples of eCommerce platforms that meet the PCI DSS standards.
Here are the examples of payment apps that have PCI DSS certification: Andy Payment, Aldelo POS, Aptify, SmartVista Suite, iGate, D-TEF, HRS Payment Gateway, ChargeItPro, TransAction+, WAY4, NanoPay, etc. Apart from these payment applications, there are many more that are PCI validated.