A complete understanding of your cardholder data environment (CDE) is a cornerstone of a successful PCI DSS compliance program, but for that, you need to ensure you include all the systems, technologies, processes, and people that comprise it because if not, an omission or lack of controls applied could lead to non-compliance.

Comprised of both the PCI Secure Software Lifecycle (Secure SLC) Standard and PCI Secure Software Standard, the PCI Software Security Framework (SSF) is intended to help secure the design, development, and maintenance of software in payment environments. And while secure coding can be difficult, taking a conceptual approach to software development may make it—and PCI SSF compliance—a little easier.

Though all compliance frameworks require organizations to provide an inventory of in-scope systems for testing, oftentimes assessors will find these provided lists aren’t accurate. However, there are at least two big benefits to maintaining an accurate systems inventory—enhanced efficiency and better management.

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of security standards designed to protect cardholder data. One of the key (and almost always applicable) requirements of PCI DSS is that organizations must perform internal and external penetration testing for the entire scoped environment—this not only applies to systems that store, process, or transmit cardholder data, but also those that can impact the security of cardholder data.

Among the many changes in the new PCI DSS v4.0 are those regarding requirement 11.4.4, which refers to the remediation of "exploitable vulnerabilities" and "security weaknesses”—though history has more clearly established what is meant by the former, there may be some confusion concerning the latter as organizations continue to make the transition to the new version.

While most healthcare providers don’t recognize that managing and securing payment data follows the same notions as managing and securing protected health information (PHI), from concept to implementation, these can, and should, work hand in hand.

As in nature, many elements function together to support the payment ecosystem, which—as a whole—creates what is our largely digital economy. Of course, due to the sensitivity of the information contained within that ecosystem, some elements are subject to compliance with the PCI DSS security requirements.

One of the latest intriguing developments in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is ChatGPT—a natural language chatbot that answers questions submitted by a human user. It’s taken off in such a way that many are using ChatGPT to assist in streamlining their writing needs, but how helpful is the bot, really?