5 Updates from PCI SSC That You Need to Know

More than 1,300 stakeholders from across the payments industry convened in Vancouver this month for the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council's (PCI SSC) North America Community Meeting.

Key topics on the agenda included a new security standard for contactless payments on off-the-shelf mobile devices, development of the next major version of the PCI Data Security Standard, and a soon-to-be released new version of the PCI standard for point-to-point encryption (P2PE). Also announced at the Vancouver event was a new Security Framework that will guide the PCI Security Council's standards and decision-making processes in the years ahead.

Much of the focus of the initiatives is on extending PCI security standards to new and emerging payment technologies such as contactless payments on mobile devices. Under the new Strategic Framework, stakeholders will have more of a say in how standards for payments security evolve in coming years. Increasingly, the focus is on ensuring organizations meet the intent and objectives of the PCI security standard and not just on whether they have the recommended controls in place or not.

For well more than a decade, all organizations handling payment card data, both directly and indirectly, have had to comply with PCI DSS. The standard — developed by MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Discover, and JCB — prescribes a set of security requirements for protecting credit and debit card data.

The controls are designed to ensure that organizations handling payment card data have secure networks and systems, secure payment applications, strong access control mechanisms, and a robust vulnerability management program and that they regularly test and monitor their networks for security issues. Numerous companies that have experienced payment card data breaches in recent years have had to pay fines and face other consequences for failing to comply with PCI requirements.

Here are five items that were on top of the agenda at the North America Community meeting in Vancouver.