Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)

This standard is used along with global credit card organizations to reduce the amount of fraud in credit/debit card transactions. An audit is done annually to validate compliance in these organizations.

This body has a broadly-defined set of policies and procedures that can be used to optimize credit and debit card transactions in a secured manner and protect cardholders from unauthorized organizations or inpiduals who want to misuse their personal information.

This PCI follows a three-step process:

• Assess: In the first step, the assets and the business processes involving card payments are verified for any sort of weakness or vulnerabilities.
• Remediate: The second step involves covering up the weakness or vulnerabilities in the business processes.
• Report: This involve the complete analysis of the issues, after which they are submitted as a report to the organization, in the form of an audit report. Major cards, such as VISA and MasterCard, comply with these regulations to validate their systems and processes.