As the number of data breaches rises and fraudsters find ever more innovative ways of accessing consumer data, companies face immense pressure to protect their customers’ sensitive data and maintain their trust.
Achieving compliance with standards such as PCI DSS is often seen as a critical milestone in this effort. However, while PCI DSS compliance is essential for any organization handling payment card information, it is crucial to understand that compliance alone does not equate to security.
If you take payments from your customers online or over the telephone and are storing their sensitive card data anywhere in your systems then PCI DSS compliance is of course a necessary part of your organization’s security strategy, but it is not on its own a comprehensive solution. Just because you are PCI DSS compliant does not mean that you are secure. If you hold your customers’ card data anywhere within your organization or network environment then that data is vulnerable to a breach, even if you are fully PCI DSS compliant.
Here’s why.
PCI DSS compliance is a security baseline, not a complete strategy
Standards such as PCI DSS are designed to provide a baseline for security measures, ensuring that organizations meet specific minimum requirements. These standards are typically developed by industry groups to address commonly known risks and create a framework for protecting sensitive data.
However, they are often slow to adapt to new threats due to the lengthy processes involved in updating standards. Cybercriminals, in contrast, are constantly evolving their tactics, continually finding new vulnerabilities and ways to exploit them. This gap between the development of compliance standards and the emergence of new threats means that a company could be fully compliant with PCI DSS but still vulnerable to the latest security risks.
For example, PCI DSS requires that organizations implement basic security measures such as firewalls, encryption, and access controls. While these are fundamental to any security strategy, they are not sufficient on their own to protect against sophisticated attacks like advanced persistent threats (APTs), zero-day vulnerabilities or social engineering tactics like phishing. The fact that you’re holding your customers’ sensitive card data means that you remain vulnerable to that data being stolen, despite being PCI compliant.
Many companies take a ‘checklist’ approach to PCI compliance
Many organizations approach compliance as a checkbox exercise—something to be completed once a year to satisfy auditors or avoid fines. This mindset can lead to a false sense of security. When compliance is treated as a goal rather than a part of an ongoing security strategy, it can result in a lack of attention to other critical aspects of security.
Security should be an integral part of a company’s culture, with continuous monitoring, employee training, and a proactive approach to identifying and mitigating risks. Compliance, by contrast, is often focused on documentation and periodic assessments, which might not reflect the actual day-to-day security practices within an organization. For instance, a company may pass a PCI DSS audit with flying colors, but if it fails to regularly update its software or neglects to monitor for unusual activity, it is still at significant risk of a data breach.
Attackers don’t care about compliance
Cybercriminals are not interested in whether a company is compliant with PCI DSS or any other standard. Their focus is on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities. This reality underscores the difference between compliance and true security. A company might have all the right paperwork in place, but if it stores data that has value to cybercriminals and has not implemented robust, adaptive security measures to protect that data, it remains a prime target for attackers.
PCI DSS is primarily focused on protecting payment card data. While this is critical, it’s not the only type of sensitive information that needs protection. Personal data, intellectual property, and other types of confidential information also need to be safeguarded, and these areas might not be fully covered by PCI DSS.
Organizations need a holistic security strategy
To truly secure an organization, compliance must be viewed as just one part of a broader, more holistic security strategy. This strategy should include advanced threat detection, regular vulnerability assessments, incident response planning, and a strong security culture that permeates every level of the organization.
While PCI DSS compliance is a vital step in protecting payment card information, it is not a silver bullet for security. The only way to guarantee that your customers’ sensitive payment card data cannot be stolen is for your organization not to store that data in the first place.
That’s where a solution like CardEasy comes in. CardEasy enables you to fully descope your contact center environment from PCI DSS. CardEasy completely removes the risk of payment card fraud within your contact center by preventing your contact center agents from hearing or seeing payment card data, using DTMF or Advanced Speech Recognition to automatically block it from your screen and call recordings (without the need for a pause/resume function) and preventing it from entering your contact center systems and networks at all. This is the only way to ensure that your customers’ sensitive payment card data cannot be breached. If you don’t hold the data, there is no data for cybercriminals to attack. Talk to us today about how CardEasy can help you.
